The West Coast Part 2: At The Coast

Our first day in Maple Ridge (Monday) was pretty slow, slept in a bit, had breakfast, then tried to figure out what we were going to do for the rest of the week. Don grew up in Maple Ridge unitil he was about 10 or 11, so he wanted to do a bit of touring around town to see his old house and school, etc. Well what we didn't really consider at the time is that part only took us about an hour, lol. We went to visit his other grandma for a couple of hours. She's quite old but stil is living on her own and still quite lively and nice to visit with. After that we killed some time at local mall for a couple of hours. Shooping out there really sucks because you don't want to buy anything as the tax is twice as much as it is back in Alberta, so I guess we did a lot of looking, not really shopping lol. Not much more really to tell for our first day.

The next morning (Tuesday) we got up nice and early as we were heading into Vancouver to Stanley Park for the day. Don's grandma is your typical grandma who won't let you out the door without a good hearty breakfast :). (We would have been fine with a bowl of cereal, lol) The breakfasts were always nice, but got a bit tiring by the end of the week becuase good as they were, we'd lose about an hour in the morning ....oh well :-/.

I had always heard about Stanley Park but never knew what the big deal was, until we got there, it's gorgeous, you'd never know you were in the middle of a huge giant city. The whole park has the awesome walk way all the way around it on the seawall, it's pretty cool. We found the aquarium, that was a lot of fun too, it was a good time to be there, no huge crowds to contend with. My highlight - I touched a sea cucumber!!! Kind of slimy and bumpy, lol. We walked around the park for a bit longer than headed out to Sunset Bay Beach. The beach was pretty cool.....not quite like Cuba :), but still pretty nice. I even braved stepping into the water, which was very cold, just to say I'd had my feet in two different oceans in the same year :), not bad if I do say so myself. We walked on the beach barefoot for awhile and picked a few shells and of course took lots of pictures. We went for supper at The Boathouse, a nice little seafood place with the best calamari I have ever had!! We were pretty worn out when we got back that night.

The next day (Wednesday) we headed into Vancouver again to go to Gas Town. Gas Town is the old waterfront area of the city, it's pretty cool, with cobble stone streets and old buildings with neat little shops in them. We parked and walked around there for awhile. We stopped for lunch at the original Old Spaghettie Factory, it was awesome! In our walking around we saw a film set and found out that a new TV series was being filmed there, starring an actor from 24 and an actress from the OC. They didn't give us any names, it was pretty cool to see though. They were obviously filming the show to be set in New York as there were fake "New York Taxis" all over the place :). After we got back to Maple Ridge we went to a movie, Hollywoodland, it was pretty good. Thank goodness there was a theater there, we were pretty busy during the day, but the evenings were pretty boring as we didn't know anyone our age out there so there wasn't a lot to do.

For our "last day" (Thursday), it was kind of a cold and dismal day. We caught the ferry accross the Fraiser River and drove to White Rock. White Rock is this neat little town on right on the border of BC and Washington, kind of a fancy touristy place. We took a walk down the beach to find some shells, however we picked a bad time of day apparently because the tide was in so there wasn't much of a beach or any shells, oh well it was still pretty nice. There's a long pier that goes out into the water for a ways and I guess a lot of people try their luck at trapping crabs there, we didn't try it, lol. Instead we went to Troll's Cafe and ate a fresh crab and some fish and chips of course :) The was the best crab legs I have have ever had, we made the biggest mess trying to eat every piece of crab meat lol. Well worth the mess though. You can't beat fresh seafood. We took a look around after lunch in some of the little shops they had along the waterfront, pretty much your typical tourist stores.

From White Rock we headed to Steveston's Warf, because that's where you go to buy fish, so I was told. Out of our whole week of driving around Vancouver and area the worst traffic ever was from White Rock to Steveston's, wow talk about grid lock and bad driving! Had a couple near misses there, one of which caused us to have to back track half hour to get back to where we were supposed to be going. It took us 3 hours to get to a place an hour away - krikey!! So we finally got there, the warf was cool with all the fishing boats and such. We went to a fish market and bought some salmon for my family back in Sask. Seafood is about half the price out there. Getting from Steveston's back to the ferry was another traffic nightmare, but we fianlly made it back to Maple Ridge in one piece. We felt kind of bad getting back so late, Don's grandma had wnated to take us out for dinner and we ended up going out so late, I'm sure it was a lot later than she would have liked, but it worked I guess.

The next morning (Friday) after yet another hearty breakfast we packed up the car, slightly more crap than we brought out with us lol. Don's grandma had a few things she wanted to send back for their family with us - including a giant bag of quilts - that took some creative packing. We said our goodbyes and stopped to say goodbye to the other grandma too before we left town.

There isn't too much to say about the trip home, we took the shortcut through the interior and stayed the night in Kamloops again. We headed straight from Kamloops to Edmonton the next day, back into all the snow and crappy weather!!! That was one long day. We did stop at a couple interesting places on our way home I guess, the Hope rock slide, and Bridal Falls, both were very nice.
It was a pretty good time out there, the weather was great, and we saw pretty much all we had planned to see, still leaving a few adventures for the next time.

The West Coast Part 1: The Drive Out

Well, now that I'm back and settled back in and caught up on work I can finally take a bit of time ot let everybody know how our vacation to BC was. We left on Friday Sept 8, and got home Monday Sept 18, so I guess we were gone for a little while. It was really a great trip, I do have to say I think September is the perfect time to travel in Canada. You are past the big tourist season, so you miss the crowds, bad traffic, and high season costs at hotels and stuff, yet the weather is still pretty great, for the most part anyway. At least it's not sweltering hot.

Friday we took off from Lloydminster and travelled as far as Edmonton and stayed there for the night at Don's parents' place. We got up nice and early Saturday morning with the intention of getting an early start, but when you are staying with family that's usually not likely to happen, lol. We got away at a decent time though. We packed our own snacks and drinks to cut down on cost and time spent stopping, it worked out pretty good. We drove to Jasper from Edmonton and stopped there for a mid afternoon lunch, unfortunatley it was getting pretty windy and rainy, so our idea to stop and have a nice little picnic was out. Instead we settled for eating in the car in some random parking lot, oh well. Carrying on through the Rockies the weather got pretty nasty with lots of sudden heavy rainstorms, thus, cancelling out any of the other sight seeing plans we had, no worries though, we can always go back to the Rockies.

Due to the crappy weather and our lack of stopping to sight see, we made excellent time on Saturday and made it all the way to Kamloops,BC. Then we got lost in Kamloops for nearly two hours looking for a hotel, I guess we just took the scenic route :). Neither of us had really been out there before though, so it wasn't that surprising that we ended up a bit lost at times. Don was there when he was a kid, but of course that was a long time ago and it's not like he paid attention to where his parents were driving either. But we did eventually find the hotel district and with the help of our handy tour guide books found a really nice place for a good price. I recommend the Comfort Inn the anyone travelling through Kamloops nice clean cozy hotel with all the amenities plus a sweet continental breakfast in the morning. The first thing we did was go for a nice long soak in the hot tub, it felt great after all that travelling.

The next morning we got a good early start and headed out again. I have to say that the Okanagan is not what I expected, it's a lot nicer than I had pictured in my head. Everything is nicely nestled in these cozy little valleys with huge rolling hills, beautiful lakes and cute little streams everywhere, it's gorgeous!!! I'd love to go back to BC one day and just spend time in the interior, there are so many neat things to do there, like wine tours and house boating. Anyway, we stopped in the town of Armstrong for lunch and went to the Village Cheese Company, I had read about this place on the internet and being a big fan of cheese it was on my list of places to stop . It was pretty cool, you could try all the differnt cheeses that they made there. We took a couple bricks of our favorites with us as well. A funny story about our stop in Armstrong, we took the turn into the town too soon and ened up on this really windy hilly backroad, it was actually really pretty, there were all these cornfields and little farms, so sometimes detours are ok :).

From there we contunued through the Okanagan passing through Vernon and we got to Kelowna and decided to stop for a bit of a break. We found a nice city park down by the Okanagan Lake and went for a nice relaxing walk to stretch our legs. I even got a dorky picture with the "Ogopogo", Okanagan Lake's version of Nessie, lol. We wandered around the park for a couple of hours just enjoying the scenery and the nice day, then we decided we better get back on the road. It was a bit disappointing while we were driving that I couldn't get a lot of nice pictures, there was hardly anywhere to pull over on the highways to stop, you'd be driving along and see a nice view and then in 2 seconds it's gone! So a lot of pictures were taken through the car window, I'm still not sure how well they turned out as we haven't even sat down to look through them yet. Oh well we know what we saw I guess.

Kelowna is really the last major city beofre you get to Vancouver so we decided to just keep on driving and get to Don's Grandma's in Maple Ridge that night. (Maple Ridge is right outside of Vancouver) We rolled into Maple Ridge at about 8:00 that night and found his grandma's house with no problems. We sat up for a little while and visited but we were pretty burned out and it wasn't long befor we hit the hay, we decided we'd figure out the rest of our vacation in the morning.

I'll Miss You Crocadile Hunter

I think we were sitting in Harvey's in Edmonton when I first heard the terrible news of Steve Irwin's death. At first I couldn't believe it, thinking it was some internet hoax (hoping rather) It wasn't until I got home that night and read the full story on cnn.com that I fianlly believed it. And it still hasn't sunk in. Those who know me, know that I was a big Croc Hunter fan, his crazy anitcs and his passion for his animals kept me glued to his shows. My little dog even would watch him LOL.

The way he died was such a fluke too, like a one in ten million chance of it ever happening to anybody, let alone the invinceable Croc Hunter. But I suppose in his line of work something was bound to happen at some point, it's still so sad though. There is apparently a tape of the whole terrible incident, I truly truly hope that this tape never ever reaches the internet or public television. I, personally would never want to see someone's final horrible moment like that. And I hope that other people out there will respect Steve and his family enough not to try and exploit this video. I hope it will be destroyed forever.

I know that there are those out there that weren't really fans of the Crocadile Hunter, and thought he was just crazy. But has anybody ever seen another person so dedicated and so passionate about their work? He has done so much for the preservation and protection of animals and their habitat all over the world. He got people to care about animals (like crocadiles) that most would never have given a second thought to. By getting right up close and personal with sometimes very dangerous animals he showed people these animals need our respect. He said in an interview in did on CNN a few years ago that his goal was to get these animals into our hearts and to make us care.....and that he did. So as they say there was a methode to his maddness. He was one of kind and there will only ever be one Crocadile Hunter.

Rest in Peace Steve Irwin.
You will be missed.