Vancouver                                                                                                    20^th – 22^nd May

The flight from Shanghai to Vancouver was unremarkable except that is was over ten hours long, and that's about 10 hours too long for me.

China Eastern was really good, and for the price we paid for these tickets I'm continuously amazed.

Vancouver was interesting, we don’t normally like big cities when we travel and try to avoid such metropolises, but Vancouver didn’t disappoint us. The food was amazing, we enjoyed mini Yorkshire Puddings stuffed with mushrooms and a pint of Kilkenny. Yum! The Kilkenny helped wash down the chips smothered in gravy, cheese and bacon. So nice but so bad for you!

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It was our first experience at an AirBNB, and possibly our last! The apartment was amazing in location, but left a bit to be desired in quality, especially as Jayne could smell the lounge suite. I couldn’t even with my new nose. But what got us was when we arrived at the apartment at 10.30am after a 3.5 hour drive from Ningbo to Shanghai and then a 45 minute taxi ride to the apartment it wasn’t ready and all the guy could say was that check-in was 3pm! Jayne wasn’t happy as he knew our flight details and this never got a mention until we were standing on the pavement in front of the apartment! With a bit of gentle coaxing from Jayne he allowed us to put our 4 bags in the apartment and to come back at 2pm.

So it was a Hop-On, Hop-Off bus trip around Vancouver for us which was partly a nice sleep for me.

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I was able to walk between our apartment and Gastown two evenings in a row. I'm not sure if it’s getting better or I'm getting better at ignoring it.

On the plus side our apartment was on the 32^nd floor with an amazing view over Vancouver, which in fact was what it was called.

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We walked along West Hastings Street and that was a bit scary, Vancouver has a very bad side to it. We were told in no uncertain terms that we shouldn’t be there and when we left were told we were doing the right thing and that it wasn’t a nice neighbourhood. Jayne was quote beside herself while we were there.

We took a ferry (if that's what you call these funny little boats) to Granville Island. Each "ferry" holds about 16 or more people plus the Captain, if you can call them that. They young girl Captain of our ferry handled it extremely well, & docked it on her own tying it to the wharf & unloading the passengers all on her own.

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They looked really funny such a small boat on such a big harbour.

We took Shane's (Alexis' Shane that is) and took the gondola to the top of Grouse Mountain for an overall view of Vancouver. Very nice.

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in Vancouver  marijuana is legal on Granville Island, I'm not sure if that's the only place its legal here, but it was the only place we saw it advertised. With my leg I'm sure I would have been able to partake, but I didn't try.

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