Roadtrip: Days 5-8 (Whistler & Vancouver)

DAY 5:
We woke up in Whistler on a brisk morning to sound of a bubbling stream that ran right behind our campsite. Not a bad way to start the day! We had made reservations to do a zipline tour at Ziptrek Ecotours - after a slight wardrobe malfunction (the zipper on my pants broke!), for which I ran back to our car to change pants, we got started, flying through the air on five separate lines that gave us a birds-eye view of the streams and forests of Whistler mountain, not to mention a good dose of adrenaline!

Here's a travel journal entry about Whistler:

"In spite of the cold overnights, I’m so happy we added Whistler to the itinerary - what a fun city. Like Disney World for adults! We ziplined, hiked, road some crazy-high gondolas, explored some fun bars and cooked an awesome meal at the campfire. Our campfire meal included lots of fresh summer squash and zucchini straight from the farm, purchased a day earlier at the Penticton Farmer’s Market."

DAY 6:
We spent our next morning hiking around the top of Whistler Mountain, scoping out future winter Olympics sites, then taking the new, world's longest gondola over to Blackcombe Mountain before hitting the road for Vancouver.

The drive, of course, was spectacular as we made our way from mountains to coast driving south along the Pacific Ocean on the Sea to Sky Highway. After checking into our hotels in downtown, we walked around the oh-so-swanky neighborhood of Yaletown and stopped for an al fresco dinner at a fabulous restaurant, Simply Thai.

DAY 7:
(From my journal, still in Vancouver)
"Woke up still feeling pretty groggy, but trooped on anyway, exploring all of downtown on foot. We started at Canada Place, a huge convention center made to look like a ship with sails, built over the water. From there, we wandered into historic Gastown, a really neat old part of the city, and then into Chinatown - the walk was not without some cheap thrills. Without realizing it, we took the dodgy, druggie street as a through-way to get from Gastown to Chinatown. In broad daylight - literally a few feet from me - two derelict men were exchanging money for a syringe of god knows what. Eek! We quickly walked along that street and luckily Chinatown was a much friendlier environment.

Wandered around a bit before settling on a dim-sum restaurant, something Alicia loved and wanted us to experience. Not knowing how dim-sum worked, Ben and I ordered tons of food at the beginning, instead of in stages like you’re supposed to! There was lots of deep-fried goodness; Chinese comfort-food, if you will, and we thoroughly enjoyed it: Steamed veggie wraps, shrimp-stuffed eggplant, pork-stickers for the carnivores, salt and pepper fried squid (I actually liked this!!), shrimp eggrolls and fried tofu. I’ve definitely had my fill of Asian food now, but glad I tried it here, where it’s some of the best!

We continued to walk along the harbor for quite a ways until we reached the West End, Vancouver’s hip gay district. Loved this area! It was charming and bustling with young people, pastry shops, flower shops, produce markets, and all right along the harbor with views down the street of water. We ended up grabbing a table at a British-style pub and I’m pretty sure we had the best view in the city, watching the sun set on the water over several pitchers of beer from a local micro-brewery."

DAY 8:
For our second day in Vancouver, we rented bikes and rode the 5.5-mile trail through Stanley Park, a gorgeous urban park that affords not only stunning skyline views, but also breathtaking vistas of the Pacific Ocean, small beaches and the many bays surrounding the city. After getting our exercise, we caught a water taxi to the famous Granville Island, a funky little island that's been transformed from an industrial district to an artsy haven of craft shops, bookstores and restaurants. A local had told us the best place for fish & chips was a small shack on the far side of the island, Go Fish.

Tracking the place down was hard work, and it proved to be a great success but also our downfall! The tiny establishment is on the harbor and brings fish in fresh from the boats each day. We waited patiently in a line full of locals, and watched hungrily as people chowed down on baskets piled with battered halibut and cod with crisp fries. We were hungry - and I mean hungry - so each ordered the largest size available, and, to our eventual detriment, ate pretty much all of it! It was one of our best meals of the trip, and highly anticipated, but the rest of the day was spent bemoaning the fact that we could barely move we were so full! Nonetheless, Ben and I made it out much later that night to get sushi with a friend of his who lives in Vancouver. Ah well, only on vacation can you justify eating so much!

From my journal, some final impressions of Vancouver:
"Am loving the laid-back, west-coast vibe of Vancouver. Feels more natural to me than Calgary. It’s just a really nice city - aside from the dodgy street, seems to be very clean with friendly people - I don’t have the sense that locals are putting on airs, or trying to show off what they have, as can be the case sometimes in Calgary. Quite the opposite, actually - everybody wants to be easy-going!"

See more pics on facebook; just click below:
Road Trip Photos Part 2

Roadtrip: Days 1-4 (Revelstoke & Kelowna)

If you read the below posts about the planning of our road trip, cheers! If not, no worries - this is my first actual post reviewing the trip in detail - sorry it got so long, but once I started writing I found there were many details I just couldn't leave out! :)

DAY 1:
Left Calgary on Wednesday, August 19 - I can't believe it was almost a month ago. We made the drive westward through the Rocky Mountains (Banff National Park, Lake Louise). Although we've been through this portion of the mountains many times now, they never get old. And just when you expect the scenery to wane (I couldn't imagine how mountains could look more impressive than what I'd already seen), they become beautiful in an entirely different way.

The peaks further west, beyond Alberta and on into British Columbia, are not as huge, but are equally majestic - green and fluid rather than craggy and gray - less foreboding than the Rocky Mountains I had grown accustomed to. One of the highlights of the drive was our pit stop in Golden, BC, a mountain town that looks industrial on the surface, but once you get into the downtown core, is very charming. We took our time buying groceries and local microbrews and enjoying a gorgeous sunny day before continuing on.

Our first night was spent in a KOA cabin in Revelstoke, BC, about four hours west of Calgary. Though the KOA was not much to speak of (a disco van playing techno music circled around for an hour advertising the KOA's ice cream social), the setting was gorgeous and our cabin was a nice place to rest after a hectic previous week of moving!

DAY 2:
We continued westward to Kelowna, BC, the heart of Canada's wine country. As the mountains got smaller, the lakes got bigger and we were yet again stunned by the sheer size of things in western Canada! Everything is larger than life - we drove for miles and miles along one huge lake before arriving at our campground, Bear Creek Provincial Park, which is situated on the Okanagan Lake, yet another massive body of water.

Canada's wine country, the Okanagan Valley, is beautiful. Though we only had time to visit one winery (Quail's Gate) in between lounging on the lake-front beach, picking cherries, attending Greg and Angie's wedding and sampling the culinary offerings of the region's bakeries and farmer's markets, I think the wines on offer could stand up to international scrutiny.

The best way to sum up this leg of the trip is probably to quote my travel journal:

"Okanagan is heaven! A bounty of fresh fruit everywhere, local wines, lush rolling hills and teal blue lakes that stretch as far as the eye can see. And how little the rest of the world knows of this treasure is shocking - perhaps this is on purpose. Perhaps Canadians prefer to keep the Thompson-Okanagan their own little secret!

We departed Revelstoke at 10:30 am after a relaxing coffee and breakfast in the fresh morning light. Finally feeling refreshed and full of energy, almost as if this is the first real day of our trip.

Driving out of the Rockies, the mountains get proggressively smaller but more lush, so are equally mesmerizing but in a different way from the craggy, grand Alberta Rockies. After about 1 1/2 hours, we split toward Kelowna and interior BC farm and lake country begins - friendly people, small towns on the side of the highway and signs for fruit stands abound.

In Vernon, we follow a handmade sign two kilometers off the main road to a U-Pick cherry farm. The sweet smell of the cherry orchards could lift the spirits of McScrooge the way it scents the air all around. Happiness! We spend about 20 minutes plucking ripe cherries from branches overhead, then pay a whopping $1.50 for our pound and a half of cherries - a little boy of probably 10 or 11, accompanied by friends, puts on his best professional face as he tallies our bill and we add a bag of freshly dried apricots to our loot. We immediately wash our cherries in a sink behind the barn and start digging in.

It may be the combination of this scenery, my husband and I on the open road, and just being on vacation, but I'm pretty sure these are the best cherries I've ever eaten!"

DAY 3:
(from travel journal)
"Had a gorgeous evening last night at the Quail's Gate Winery in Kelowna, after an afternoon of sunbathing and swimming at the Okanagan Lake, which our campground backed up to. Looked almost as if we were in the Spanish or Italian countryside ... but this is Canada, full of surprises!

After a somewhat lazy morning at the campground, we packed up the car (I hope we are never in a huge hurry to do this after camping, as it's an elaborate process to get everything back in, like a lifesize puzzle), we picked up Alicia at the Greyhound station and went for a brief exploration of downtown Kelowna, which is much more charming and character-filled than the suburbs we drove through to get there. The exploration sent us off toward Greg and Angie's Penticton (a town south of Kelowna) wedding with fresh-baked goodies and the desire to sit down for a beer at one of the town's cute pubs - but onward we went, for more stunning driving along the Okanagan Lake.

Greg and Angie's wedding feels like it's in a secret garden - the colors of the flowers everywhere are breathtaking! Bushy green and white hydrangeas (my favorite), spiky yellow and purple flowers, pinks, reds - if only I knew the names of more of them!

Greg's best friend played acoustic guitar for the intimate ceremony, and I felt honored to be let into this magical moment in the lives of two wonderful people. This was my type of wedding - small, heartfelt, outdoors, relaxed!

As souviniers, we were each given handmade fruit preserves assembled by Angie's family members. Ben and I made off with cherry and strawberry rhubarb - yum, can't wait to dig in!"

DAY 4:
(from travel journal)
"Alicia is a fun and lively addition to our roadtrip! I'm pretty groggy after last night's wedding festivities, but couldn't sleep knowing that today is gorgeous and sunny outside. I'm sitting in our folding Canada-flag chair in the parking lot of the pink motel we stayed at last night - El Rancho! Cheap but clean, it's a great retro find, all the way down to the old-fashioned staff that greeted us with a smile and held our reservation without a credit card - just my name, the old-fashioned way. I like that."

My early morning in Pentiction was followed by a great day of shopping the best farmer's market I've experienced, then a leisurely breakfast and a quick drop-in to an after-wedding celebration at Angie's childhood home, which sits atop a lovely hill overlooking orchards. Her Italian family made sure to send us on the road with heaping plate-fulls of delicious food!

Then it was on to our next stop, Whistler. The drive was gorgeous, if stressful - through narrow, windy mountain roads for almost all six hours of it! We hit some very deserted patches, including a huge, somewhat eerie First Nations (Canada's term for Native Americans) reservation. The area seemed uninhabitable, with weathered red and gray boulders and jagged terrain as far as the eye could see. As I was in the midst of capturing the wild geography on video, we were starteld by a loud crash against metal...

Ben pulled the car to the side of the road and we examined everything - all we could figure was that a large rock had rolled down one of the road-side hills and sailed right under the car, where it struck with lots of noise but luckily no damage that we could see. Which was good, considering we had no cell phone reception in this no-man's land, hours from any civilization!

Sobered, we continued on cautiously and the boulders turned to mountains as we entered the Rocky Mountains once more, where they continue on along the west coast. This is the last time I will rely on Google maps, which clearly sent us on the most round-about, least-used mountain roads possible! I took over driving for the remainder of the trip, racing against the sun to get through the mountains. Avalanche warnings were everywhere, including on the narrow, one-way section of road that seemed it could barely fit even one car, nestled up against a cliff with a sheer drop to the left. The road looked as though it had been roughly rebuilt in previous days. Now, I know that I harbor an irrational fear of driving along steep drop-offs (or even not-so-steep ones), but this would scare even the bravest person!

Just when we thought we'd gotten through the worst of it, road construction began and we had lost our battle with the sun. So in the darkness, I was forced to navigate through one-way lanes and bridges, blasting zones, and rocky sections of road that should have required an off-road vehicle. When we finally arrived at our campground in Whistler, it was as though all three of us let out a collective breath that we had been holding for the past few hours!

Here's a quick blurb from my travel log about the experience:

"The drive from Kelowna to Whistler is something else I should mention ... beautiful but terrifying at times, going on windy mountain roads that looked as though they had recently been destroyed by an avalanche, then hastily rebuilt on the side of a cliff. There was lots of avalanche debris and at times I wondered how the road could even be considered a real road.

We watched the sun set over the Rockies, and to my surprise, they erupted back up out of the ground not far beyond the hilly Okanagen region. There was truly never a dull moment on our drive - especially when a giant rock rolled off a hill and under our car, making us fear the worst: that maybe the car had been badly damaged in the middle of nowhere, BC. Amazingly, the sound was way worse than the reality, and we found no problem with the car and continued trucking along.

Some of the tiny mountain fishing towns we went through seemed surreal, as if they were from an old movie where everything is faded and a bit hazy, and things just move slower."

Anyway, after the driving ordeal, we set up our tent in the dark, bundled up and enjoyed the relief that comes with not fearing that you'll drive off the side of a mountain :)

Check out photos of this portion of the trip on my facebook photo album, by clicking below:
Facebook Album Part 1

The Plan

It took Ben and I months of organizing and planning to decide where we wanted to go for our road trip and what activities we most wanted to do. We were amazed to discover that we could easily have spent twice as long in this part of the world, camping our way through all the mountains and parks, exploring further south into Oregon and northern California - but three weeks turned out to be perfect - by the end, we were pretty tired and looking forward to the comfort of our own home!

Anyway, here's a rough outline of our itinerary:

1) Revelstoke, BC (in the western part of the Rocky Mountains): camp one night as it's a half-way point between Calgary and our next stop...
2) Okanagen Valley, British Columbia: camp & attend friends' wedding
3) Whistler, BC: camp for two nights
4) Vancouver, BC: three nights in a downtown hotel
5) Hornby Island, BC (on Vancouver Island): camp two nights
6) Telegraph Cove, BC (on Vancouver Island): camp two nights
7) Tofino, BC (Vancouver Island): camp three nights
8) Victoria, BC (Vancouver Island): two nights in a downtown hostel
9) Seattle, WA: three nights in a rented condo near downtown
10) Spokane, WA: one night in a hotel
11) Kootenay National Park, Britsh Columbia: one night in a cabin

And back to Calgary, full circle. Here's a general idea of what our route looked like ... we estimate that we covered more than 2,500 miles!

Trip Report and a New Place!

I've been procrastinating on updating the blog, as I know this will be a long one! Ben and I returned a few days ago from our amazing three-week road trip across western Canada and the US, and are still trying to re-adjust to normal life. Luckily, the gorgeous weather in Calgary is making this task much easier! It also doesn't hurt that Ben has this week off of work so there's time to recuperate and finish sorting out our new house.

In a bold move, we switched from our apartment downtown into the main floor of a house about a five minutes' drive west of town ... the day before leaving for our trip. We came home to a mess and have been slowly unpacking boxes, in addition to sorting through the rubble that results from three weeks of living out of a car!

I'm glad to say that we are still very happy with our choice to move. The quiet neighborhood provides the best night's sleep I've had in a while, Bosco loves the small backyard, and Ben and I have already discovered that we're a short 15-minute walk from the city's biggest and best park, a two minute walk from another smaller park, and 1/2-mile from the grocery store, liquor store and everything else we could need, not to mention how great it is to wake up on the ground floor to the sounds of birds, not jackhammers, and to have a kitchen that Ben and I can both fit in at the same time!

Now that I've elaborated on our new place, time to move on to the good stuff ... our trip! I've decided to break it into several different blog entries, to make it a bit easier to scan through - I will warn you that this will probably be long, so read what you want, ignore whatever I seem to blab on about, and hopefully enjoy!! It was the trip of a lifetime, and I wouldn't hesitate to encourage everybody to visit any of the sites we were lucky enough to see :)

I would suggest starting at the bottom and working your way up, as I'll try to post everything in the order that it happened... please be patient, as it may take me some time!