Wednesday 12th April – Visiting Vancouver

We had been really lucky with the weather for our boat trips yesterday.  Today was another rainy morning – so no one ventured out.  We watched The Goonies instead (again!) to re-live the locations we’d all been to.

Totem pole by our campsite

We checked out slightly late and drove half an hour to the ferry port in Nanaimo – we had selected a different route back to the mainland, from Departure Bay over to Horseshoe Bay just North of Vancouver.  The crossing was very grey and rainy.  No chance of seeing whales even if they were out there, so we played cards.  From the docks, it was only 20 minutes’ drive to Capilano RV park, under a main bridge over to Downtown Vancouver.

We chilled out on the RV briefly before going into town.  We had two options to get into the City – bus or taxi.  Sadly, there is no Uber or Lyft taxis here yet, so our normal option was out.  The RV park called us a yellow cab, but when our driver turned up it turned out he was new in town.  He took the long way round and in combination with rush hour traffic it was clearly going to be an expensive lift in - CAD35! 

Over CAD 16.00 and we hadn't even crossed the bridge yet....

What the driver lacked in local knowledge, he made up for with suggestions for other locations in Canada for us to try, not that I can remember any of them now.  Jo and I had done some research to find points of interest in the City.  We got the cab driver to drop us off near a ‘shrine’ to Jimi Hendrix and Bob Marley. It was a tiny, grubby door into something resembling a shop… and it was shut until June! It didn’t look like we were missing much.

Trying to direct us to something positive, I remembered seeing a steam clock in the City when I last visited back in 1997! We walked there and it was a lot smaller than I recall....

The Gas Town Steam Clock - the World's first steam-powered clock... despite it's size the whole clock weighs over 2 tons!

Enough of us trying to be proper tourists, what we all wanted was to find a decent bar and get some food!  We found the Lamplight bar as our first stop for a couple of drinks, but that ended up being our haunt for the rest of the night.  Mostly because we got a great table right in front of the big screen and the Stanley Cup hockey play-offs were on.  It’s addictive.  And violent!  We saw the Edmonton Oilers Vs San Jose and ended up ordering chicken wings to share, before I had fish and chips for main course.  There was a great atmosphere in the bar and we each found a local beer that we enjoyed.  To make the regular breaks in footage more enjoyable the bar had bingo in between periods – to win drinks or shots for your table (we didn’t win).  When one game ended, another one began.  Because it’s the start of the play-offs the matches seem never-ending.  I did some research and the teams have to win four games against their opponents to progress to the second round – that’s best of seven matches! 

We ended up tearing ourselves away about 10pm so we wouldn’t be worse for wear in the morning as we have another early appointment for some wildlife watching.