Adventures in Vancouver

Oh my -- I almost forgot to blog this morning. I'm reading this LONG book and want to know how it ends, so I'm sneaking in any possible moments to finish it. It's over 1,000 pages on my phone, which is long, and I'm not sure it needs to be that long. I find it very confusing -- so many characters and so many details. I've no idea how the author was able to keep everything together. In case you're wondering, it's called Lethal White by Robert Galbraith. And yes -- I know that is JK Rowlings! 

The weather turned out perfect yesterday -- a bit cloudy, not too cold, and just a few drops of rain! So what to do all day? We decided to go for a walk around the city and used the Adventure Labs as our guide! That's what's so fun about the Adventure Labs; you have no idea where you'll end up. And we saw a few places M didn't know about, so we were really exploring together. 

Bear started the day with us when we went to Stanley Park, but we ditched him just before lunch as he is very slow. 

OH -- M needed to get a urine sample from him, which was hilarious, but while I held the leash, she did the dirty end of the business, and we were able to get it right away, so we walked over to the vet and got that errand out of the way. 

Someone who was recently here showed us a neat building and asked if M knew where it was. Yep -- it wasn't far from where we were, so we popped over to see it. I call it the Quilt Building, as all four sides looked like this. Oh my -- I just found an article about this building -- you can see the before and after - it was HIDEOUS before. 

The "quilt" building

We saw lots of artwork and sculptures along the way. This sculpture was called A-Maze-ing Laughter, but you can't see what it's all about in this photo. I think there are 12 sculptures, all in various stages of laughter. 

M and Bear

We went into Stanley Park instead of walking the seawall, as that is where the Adventure Labs were taking us. We were shocked to see so many flowers still blooming, and the blooms were gorgeous. 

They were huge, and the colors were still very vibrant. We saw some very sleepy bees on some of them as well. 

Beautiful blooms

We did two Adventure Labs in that area and then headed back to the apartment to drop off Bear and have lunch. 

Then, we headed in a new direction into an area with beautiful heritage homes. They were absolutely stunning. I had looked up one house for sale, and the price was a cool $3.5 Million. Some of these homes appear to be boarding houses, as this one had many bedrooms and a basement apartment, but there was no shared living space. How awful is that? 

Vancouver Heritage home

We discovered the cutest little alley (Mole Hill) and spotted lush gardens along both sides of the little path and a little creek with goldfish! I know --- loads of little secrets hidden in plain view. 

I had a great uncle (I think) who owned a house in downtown Vancouver and refused to sell. I'll have to find out where that was. It looked so weird with the house surrounded by apartment buildings. 

While M doesn't really do any geocaching, she had attempted to do one close to her place. But she had looked numerous times but couldn't find it. So we were subtly searching through flower beds and along a rock wall but found nothing. OK, so it's time to look further afield, and I soon spotted it. So that made the morning! 

We discovered the "O Canada" house, where one of the English first verses of O Canada was penned. Yep -- one of those heritage houses is now a B and B. Then we headed into the downtown area to find some artwork. 

After a bit of searching, we discovered the murals were on the ground, and after looking at the name of the Adventure Lab (Art under foot), that made sense. It's funny how we could have walked past those murals a thousand times without seeing them. This project was called Footprints Community Art Project, but I can't find much else about it other than some of the artist's name and photos of other murals. 

Part of our Adventure Lab tour

Again, I LOVE the geocaches and Adventure Labs because they take you to places and get you to look at things you might never see otherwise!! 

Then, we headed home and stopped in a few shops along Robson Street along the way. So I'm still behind on my walking challenge, but the 20 KM of walking yesterday will be a good start to put me back on track. 

I should be able to catch up within a week or so? There will not be much travel in the next couple of weeks and only a few Zooms, so I should be good. 

As much as travel is "fun" and exciting, I can't wait to get home. It'll be good to unpack everything, do a bit of planning to see where I need to focus my time in the next bit, and then actually get some sewing and quilting done! 

On that note, I'm out of here!!!!

Have a great day!

Ciao!!