Last Day in Vancouver

Jun
11
2018
by hedera | 0 Comments

I haven’t mentioned the b&b we stayed at in Vancouver.  The West End Guest House was fascinating.  Built in 1906, it’s very central, between the center of the city and Stanley Park; you can walk to Robson Street for shopping and dining.  When we were there it was run by a young gay couple, and while I think they were in the process of refurbishing it (my diary suggests not everything was perfect), it now gets 5 stars from TripAdvisor.  And the breakfast conversation was amazing.   The other guests included a Scottish couple (leaving next morning for Moraine Lake near Banff, where we stayed in 2004), a British couple (eventually planning to go out to Tofino, before visiting a son in Melbourne), a Swiss couple, a Chinese couple, and an Iranian named Ali from Houston, Texas.  The Chinese couple didn’t talk very much, although another guest said that the man’s English was better than his Chinese!  We were there on the day of the Brexit referendum, and I remember having a long discussion on it with the British woman in the afternoon.

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Exploring Vancouver

May
14
2018
by hedera | 0 Comments

When we go to Vancouver, we almost always visit Van Dusen Gardens. And so we did this time.  We spent an afternoon wandering around, looking at the changes they’d made since the last time.  We’ve been there so often I only took a few photos this time; click here to see the whole gallery.  I’ll share a couple of examples.  This is their swamp garden:

And this is the fountain in the lake, which is kind of their signature view:

Feel free to go look at the whole gallery, and also to check the gallery I shot when we visited in 2011 – click here for that link.

The second day we were there, though, we did something new.  We’ve found Vancouver’s Bard on the Beach Shakespeare company to be very rewarding, so we had bought tickets to their production of the Merry Wives of Windsor.  Instead of just going out there for the play, however, we decided to spend the entire day in Kitsilano, which is a charming district in Vancouver fronting on English Bay.  We’d stayed in Kitsilano before, but had never just hung out on the beach. 

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Waiting for the Ferry

Jan
23
2018
by hedera | 0 Comments

After a pleasant weekend visiting our friends in Powell River, we drove off toward Vancouver.  Powell River being where it is, our first stop was the Saltery Bay – Earl’s Cove ferry terminal.  On a Monday morning, it wasn’t very busy, but the view was nice.

Saltery Bay Ferry terminal

Having nothing else to do, I got the camera out and went looking for things to photograph.  By gum, I found a bald eagle perching in a tree next to the terminal.

Bald eagle

He eventually flew down and landed on the sandbar, where I couldn’t get a decent shot of him.  I watched a 6-person canoe or scull paddle by:

Paddling down the inlet

Eventually the ferry came in:

Ferry arriving at Saltery Bay

The Saltery Bay ferry takes you just over the inlet to Earl’s Cove, after which you drive the length of the Sunshine Coast to the Langdale-Horseshoe Bay Ferry, which you take to the mainland.  Then you drive on into Vancouver.  I regret to say there are no reasonable photo ops from the Sunshine Coast Highway; it’s just a highway, mostly surrounded by tall trees on both sides.  Pretty; hardly photographic.  The drive takes about an hour and 20 minutes (79.8 km or not quite 50 miles). 

I took some photos from the ferry, of the area around the Langdale ferry terminal, and of the trip among the islands as we traveled down to Vancouver; if you’d like to see them, the whole gallery is called Ferry to Vancouver.

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Visiting Point Reyes

Jan
09
2018
by hedera | 0 Comments

On December 29, Jim and I decided to drive over to Point Reyes Lighthouse and see if we could see any whales.  It was a mild sunny day, the Friday before New Year’s, and he thought there might be a smaller crowd than on the actual weekend, when we’d have to park well away and ride a shuttle bus in.

We drove over in the late morning and were stunned to find very light traffic – on Interstate 80, on 580 over the Richmond Bridge, and almost no traffic at all on Lucas Valley Road, which we took out to Highway 1.  We planned to have lunch in Point Reyes Station.  As we got to Highway 1, we saw the first serious traffic of the day – apparently everyone else was going to Point Reyes Station too.  We parked and started to look for a restaurant, and were stopped by an older woman who was standing on the corner marveling at the crowds.  “I’ve never seen so many people here,” she said.  She then turned to us and asked, “What are you two doing here?”  We laughed and said we were on our way to Point Reyes.  She wasn’t hostile, merely amazed; we chatted briefly and she recommended a restaurant.  Point Reyes Station is a very small town.

After lunch we drove on out to Point Reyes.  If you’ve never done it, it’s a long drive, through farm country – you do the entire trip on Sir Francis Drake Blvd West, turning off Highway 1.  The directions on the park site say turn off Highway 1 onto Bear Valley Road, but that shortly becomes Sir Francis Drake West.  At several points the road ran through the inhabited areas of local ranches; once we had to stop and wait until the cattle finished crossing the road.  It’s very beautiful and very far from anywhere else.

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At Sea on the Cruise Ship

Jan
01
2018
by hedera | 0 Comments

I have no photographs from the cruise while we were at sea.  Frankly, the open ocean, or even the ocean relatively near the coast, is not very “photograph-able.”  It’s a flat blue expanse below a featureless blue sky, when it isn’t a flat gray expanse below a featureless gray ditto.  That’s why most of the photos I took were in port.  I’ll get to them in later posts.

If I ever cruise again, which is not a given, I’ll want to find a female friend to room with.  There weren’t any real problems with my roommate, except that she is very close friends with the couple who organized the trip, and she preferred to hang out with them.  She and I were the only people in our group who weren’t part of a couple.  I can’t speak for her, but I spent most of my meals alone in the buffet – or briefly alone.  I soon found that if I sat down at an empty table with 4 settings, within 10 minutes or so a couple would come along and ask if they could join me; and most of them were quite friendly and chatty.  So that was interesting, and passed the time.  It isn’t a way to make friends, but people on cruises tend to be quite friendly and outgoing.  I was amazed at the number of people who prefer cruising as their chosen vacation.  I had no idea.

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On to Powell River

Dec
21
2017
by hedera | 0 Comments

Janet, a girl I went to high school with in Napa, California, married in the late ’70s, and she and her husband Wes moved to Powell River, British Columbia, where they stayed and raised 2 children.  When we’re in the area, we often go to visit them, and so in 2016. 

Where, you ask, is Powell River??  Well, it’s on the B.C. coast, just north of the “Sunshine Coast” (which I normally associate with rain).  From Vancouver it takes 2 ferry rides and about a half day driving.  From Victoria, still a half day driving but only 1 ferry ride, from Comox to Powell River.  It used to have a paper mill (Macmillan Bloedel), but that closed; now it’s mainly tourism.

Here’s the view across the strait from the Comox Ferry terminal, waiting for the ferry:

View from Comox Ferry terminal

The ferry looks like a ferry; there’s a photo in the gallery, to see the whole gallery click here. 

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Try Something New

Oct
07
2017
by hedera | 0 Comments

I did something new in the summer of 2017.  I took a Princess Cruise – inside passage, to Alaska and back.  I didn’t do this on my own.  I sing with the Oakland Symphony Chorus, directed by Dr. Lynne Morrow of Sonoma State University.  Dr. Morrow – Lynne – is, among other things, a scholar of African American spirituals, and this cruise was her second effort at a floating seminar on the subject, ending in a single performance on the ship, the last night before we docked in San Francisco.  I couldn’t go the first time she did this, a couple of years ago, so when I got an email about it in September 2016, I signed up. 

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Albion Manor, Victoria

Oct
03
2017
by hedera | 0 Comments

I don’t have any photos from the ferry ride over to Victoria from Seattle.  This is partly because it started at 7 AM, a time of day when I’m not fully functional.  Besides, you don’t see much of interest from a ferry, just a lot of water.  On that ride you didn’t even see many islands.  When we got to Victoria, we rented a car and drove to the bed and breakfast where we’d reserved a room, called Albion Manor.  (The link goes to a photo gallery; excerpts below.)  We enjoyed it very much.  First, it’s a beautiful house with varied and interesting decorations and gardens; it turned out one of our hosts had been a set designer, and still likes to pick up beautiful and odd items at auctions.  Second, our hosts and their staff ran the place very well and served us wonderful breakfasts.  Our room was in the basement and was very comfortable. Here’s a picture of the house.

Albion Manor

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A Night on the Train

Sep
06
2017
by hedera | 1 Comment

As happens too often, I’m a year late blogging this vacation.  Oh, well.  My plan this time is to blog 2 years in parallel, but we’ll see. 

In 2016 we decided we hadn’t visited British Columbia in a while, so we set up a trip.  I was happy to learn that my friends Janet and Wes, who’ve lived up there since something like 1979, would be available if we came by on the dates we had in mind.  But our trip began unusually.  Instead of driving or flying, we decided to take the train – we booked a “bedroom” (a gross misrepresentation!) on the Coast Starlight, overnight from Oakland to Seattle.  The train was supposed to arrive at 9:30 PM; it was half an hour late and then we were off.

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Fire in the Hills

Aug
03
2017
by hedera | 2 Comments

Of all the things that have gone wrong this summer, I didn’t need this afternoon’s fire in the Berkeley hills:

http://www.ktvu.com/news/271576653-story

It started at 5 acres and 3 hours later seems to be under control (at 10 acres).  But I was here in 1991 for the Oakland Hills fire and it’s not anything you forget.  I’m still nervous on hot days with an east wind.  My husband is off backpacking, and there’s just a limit to what I could evacuate in my little car, all by myself.  And the real test will be tomorrow – the 1991 fire was supposedly put out the day before, but it wasn’t all gone, and the next day’s stiff winds blew it up into a firestorm.

This one went from a 2 alarm fire to a 5 alarm fire in 3 hours, but I’m not the only one who remembers 1991.  The local fire departments dumped resources onto it; last notice I find says it’s moving toward Contra Costa County, behind the Berkeley hills.  I drove home from downtown Oakland this afternoon and saw the smoke, and it stopped me in my tracks (metaphorically; I kept driving).

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