The not-so-daily ramblings of an Aussie in Vancouver
Tuesday, March 22nd, 2011
Forgive me readers, for I have sinned. It has been many days since my last blog post. This is because we’re into to our last two weeks here in Canada and there is just way too much to do in our last small amount of time here.
One thing we did do two weekends ago was escape to Hopkins Landing, which is only a single ferry ride away from Vancouver and right at the very south end of “the sunshine coast”, but it may as well be a world away when you’re whiling the time away in front of the gas fire and the stars are peeking in through the skylights.
The sunshine coast is called that because apparently it gets more sun than Vancouver annually, and its a favourite escape point for Vancouverites. We chose Hopkins Landing as it was so easy to get to and we could walk to our holiday cabin from the ferry… We sold our truck a few months ago, so we’re down to public transport and our feet for getting ourselves around.
The cabin we rented was fantastic. Grand views across the water to the back side of Cypress Mountain, framed by Gambier island on our left and Keats and Bowen island on our right. You may have read my blog post from where we climbed up Mt Gardener on Bowen island this time last year. To save me describing the cabin in great detail, here’s a collage of the interior, taken using the Autostitch iPhone app.
Here’s a sunrise view from out the front:
After spending three nights at this place we didn’t want to leave…
Sunday, March 13th, 2011
I thought I’d bring you guys with me on my trip to work, starting with the view from our patio and ending with the trip on the skytrain from Waterfront station all the way down to Riverrock Casino. My trip from there on is pretty uneventful, so this is all you get 
Saturday, February 26th, 2011
One of the nice things about being in Vancouver during the winter is waking up and seeing the north shore mountains absolutely covered with snow, all the way down to a certain point. This is the freeze line, and it’s such an obvious cut off most of the time that it is quite remarkable to see it cut across the faces of all the mountains almost straight as a die.
The lights of North Vancouver seem to shine more brightly and the place just seems so much prettier when the freeze line is low. I think so anyway!
Friday, February 11th, 2011
What a great day this was! We had a BBQ to celebrate Australia day on the Saturday following Australia Day, out in Stanley Park under Ceperley Pavillion near 2nd beach. Now, this may sound like a great place to host an event during summer when it’s warm, but during the winter when it’s cold and miserable outside you really have to wonder…
Still, what’s Australia Day without a BBQ? We had around 25 hardy souls turn up with ages ranging from under 20 to well over 65, and multiple countries too, not just Australian and Canadian!
Of course it rained for much of the day, so we weren’t able to have the usual game of football or cricket, but it was great hanging out with a bunch of other Aussies for the day. We also managed to raise over $100 that has already been donated towards the Queensland flood appeal. A big shout out goes to all those who do donated and the Clancy’s Meat franchisee in Nordel who donated a bunch of snags and patties to keep the BBQ cooking. A big thanks also goes to Brooke who baked 30 lamingtons, all of which disappeared within minutes of the covers being pulled off.
Here’s some happy snaps, courtesy of Anna and Ben,
Some of the crew earlier on – there was up to 25 or so later on:
Yours truly manning the BBQ, with Brooke and Richard monitoring quality control
And some pictures courtesy of Brooke:
Sunday, January 16th, 2011
So this is another of our previous trips, except I realised after I wrote the last one that I didn’t quite go back to the start of our adventures – I forgot the stopover that we had in Taiwan on the way over here.
Like most Aussies heading to Canada, we were on a budget for our flights. And by budget I mean “cheapest possible”. And little did we know that doing it on the cheap would actually net us a little adventure before we even started our lives in Canada! Checking out the flights before we booked, the cheapest flights were mostly through Los Angeles, however the cheapest of them all was actually flying China Air and went through Taipei. So we picked that, then found out that it had a stopover. For close to 30 hours. Wait, what? It was okay though, as the airline laid on a hotel so really it was like a free trip to Taiwan.
Our knowledge of Taiwan pretty much extended to the “made in” tags that you find on a lot of toys and electronics, and the firm knowledge that it was a stinky smoggy city, right? Oh well, worth the explore.
We flew in late at night after a close to 10 hour flight from Melbourne or Sydney, can’t remember which. Not knowing our way around we grabbed a cab and told him where we were going – “The Liz”. Sounded pretty upmarket! So we drove for ages, to the point where we thought we were going round in circles as the island wasn’t that big, was it? But I’d looked into it a tiny bit before we left and found that it was a little way from the airport to where our hotel was, so we trusted the dude and carried on. Even after he filled up with gas/petrol. Even when he started radio’ing in to hq to see if anyone knew where “The Liz” was. We had an address, but that didn’t seem to help. Eventually after fighting our way up and down a couple of alleys he found the hotel and dropped us off. We checked in and were shown to our room in the basement. It was reasonable enough, slight smell of mould, but it sure was an adventure 
We crashed to sleep after the long flight.
Next morning we got up and went upstairs to help ourselves to the complimentary buffet breakfast. Holy crap, I don’t think I’ve ever felt so “westernized” as when I was trying to work out what to have for breakfast. Nothing was really recognisable apart from what was maybe eggs, but we dug in anyway and found it was reasonably good. We were sitting opposite some Taiwanese who lived in the US but regularly came back and they gave us some pointers for the day. After breakfast we grabbed a tourist map from the front desk and went out to experience the city. Here’s a quick pictorial guide to some of the stuff we got up to that day:
On reflection, it was an amazing opportunity to get a free stay in Taiwan, but it actually showed how unprepared we were for the stay. We didn’t really know what to do or see, and just grabbed a map and walked. We were lucky enough that we stumbled on The Palace Museum and Danshui township, but next time I’d like to be a little more prepared and know a thing or two. I guess it’s a little reflection on the difference between my mindset three years ago versus one that is now used to traveling to various places for short periods of time… I’ve got my ex-work to thank for that.
In short, if you’ve got the time and you get a free stop over, take advantage of it!
Saturday, January 1st, 2011
Every year starting in late November and finishing up in early February, hordes of Bald Eagles flock to Sqaumish & Brackendale, which are about an hour north of Vancouver. Flocks. As in sometimes 100′s, sometimes 1000′s with almost 4000 eagles counted in the area in 1994.
So being that I had the week off and it was a glorious blue sky day, we decided to pack the twins into the car and head up there to see what we could see. There was an accident somewhere in the system, so we got stuck in traffic for an hour trying to get into Stanley Park and onto Lions Gate Bridge, but from there it was clear sailing all the way through, apart from a cranky baby stop partway there.
Hey, I even made a timelapse of the trip up for you! I sped up the traffic bit so you don’t have to sit through it…
The place to go is apparently the flood levy in Brackendale, so we loaded up the stroller and cruised along there – Quite a few birds in the trees! Not as many as I had anticipated of course, but here’s a likely character:
Nat saw one much closer than that as we were driving around afterwards, and there was a few wheeling around, but most seemed pretty content hanging out in the trees in a special park that is there just for them. During eagle season there’s always some folks there from the local birdwatching brigade with telescopes set up if you want to get a closer look at the birds. Well worth a look for the small donation they request.
The flood levy:
Of course, being winter and a clear day, it was bloody cold up there. We were rugged up of course, but the boys seemed to object to having been cooped up in the car all morning and decided to get cranky when we’d walked only a little way along the path. Still, we managed to get a couple of nice family shots
Then the sun started to go down, so we headed back to the car
From here the day turned into a bit of a average one, including changing a nappy on a gravel roadside where *someone* had managed to get poop all the way up to their socks, necessitating a COMPLETE disrobing and wardrobe change on the side of the road, during which that certain *someone* also decided to evacuate their bladder. They shot most of it out the side of the truck, but also managed to give parts of our truck interior a bit of a golden shower… Then of course we got stuck in traffic for another 2 hours coming back over the bridge due to another accident. Great!
Still, it was really nice to be out in the sun and doing something different, and I’d suggest getting out to see the eagles if you’re on your way through the area to Whistler or wherever, or you don’t have baby twins in tow…
Tuesday, December 28th, 2010
So one thing I’ve been interested in for ages but never really gotten to play around with is Timelapse. You know, those awesome videos where they do one shot every second then put it all together in a movie that looks really cool if done well. That’s the idea anyway.
Here’s an example of time lapse done well:
If you want to do timelapse properly, the best way to do it is with an SLR and a laptop of dongle gizmo. Then you can get some real speccy stuff like above…
Anyhoo, I finally got my hands on a camera capable of timelapse today without having to have any extra accessories, just a little happy snapper Canon Ixus that has already been beaten within an inch of its life, but hey… it was free! It only takes 640px video, and only has the option to snap a shot every 1 second or 2 seconds.
I’m going to have a play with it over the next few months and try to capture some of the things we do around Vancouver, trips etc, so stay tuned…
Here’s a couple of rough ones to start off with. Just hand held ones, so they’re pretty jumpy, but I captured these tonight when I was night skiing up at Cypress Mountain, one of the local mountains near Vancouver. Considering we went for a long walk on the Seawall in the sun and got lunch at Granville Island, then caught the sea bus back, and THEN went skiing for 5 hours in the afternoon/evening, I think Vancouver is one of the coolest damn cities you could live in.
The vids:
I think I’ve certainly learnt my first lesson in that doing hand held timelapse isn’t the best idea, particularly whilst partaking in an active sport like skiing. Some of the chairlift stuff wasn’t too bad though…
Thursday, December 23rd, 2010
Last night we were lucky enough to be invited to go on the last evening horse and carriage ride around Stanley Park for the season… For free!
We started off near the rose garden (for those who know the park), which is sort of central north east. We then did a circuit around the eastern and northern side of the park, which took more than an hour. It’s a very cool way to see the park, as it’s quite a slow trip – some joggers left us in their dust at one stage – and you also by grand views if the north shore with Lions Gate Bridge perched between the park and the shore beautiful as always. Grouse mountain was looming in the background, and all you could see in the darkness was the lights from the ski hill lighting up the sparse cloud surrounding it like a halo.
Upon returning, and suffering a case of “numb bum” from the wooden seats, we decided to go check out Bright Nights, which is a Christmas light show put on by firefighters in Stanley Park every year as a fundraising appeal. It’s huge! Lots n lots of lights, stalls for snacks and last night it was absolutely stacked with people, half of whom seemed to be waiting to go on the train ride they have as part of the show.
It’s fun to see though, and the last time we went was two years ago in the depths of the snow dump we had. That meant that there was over a foot of snow on the ground and the lights looked amazing! Proper white Christmas stuff
Here’s some happy snaps:
Wednesday, August 25th, 2010
With the boys now at home and occupying most of my spare time and pretty much 100% of Nat’s time, we’ve realised a couple of things:
SO with the above and a few other things in mind, we’ve decided to head back to Tassie next April (2011). It wasn’t a decision that we took lightly, but in the end it wasn’t that hard – the support and having the kids grow up around their grandparents (free babysitting!) pretty much made up our minds plus the cheaper cost of living available in Tassie. I’ll also be taking my job home with me, so that’s another plus, as there won’t be that horrible job searching part.
In light of all this, there won’t be many exciting trip stories to tell, just burping and pooping stories which you’ll find on the boys blog, plus tidbits from my life around Vancouver. So I’ve decided that to make this blog a more complete memory of our time here in Vancouver, I’m going to go back through all the trips that we’ve done previously and stick them in here for posterity. I hope you enjoy the ride and they inspire some of you to get out and about. My particular favourites are the trips to Oregon, Tofino on Vancouver Island and Nahatlatch, which is in the Fraser Canyon (kinda), about 5 hours east of Vancouver, but we’ve actually been to a surprising amount of places in our time here… enjoy!
_____________________________
Vancouver – Sunshine Coast – Powell River – Courtenay/Comox – Nanaimo – Vancouver round trip
Looking at that title, that seems like a hell of a lot of places to visit and a fair bit of distance to travel, but we did it all in the space of a weekend not long after we got to Vanco (more…)
Friday, August 13th, 2010
I’m excited, as I’ve just linked up a new blog to the CanAussie.com network of blogs. This one is by Grant and Gen, some friends of ours from Tassie, and they’re off on a big trip around the world, stopping by in Canada for a few months this winter to help change diapers… I mean, to experience the winter season and probably do a ski season at one of the resorts close to Vancouver.
They are current in South America and have just visted a glacier that is growing at a rate of 2 meters a day. How cool is that?! It’s not often you hear about a glacier that is actually growing, and from the pictures it certainly looks a lot fresher than the ones we’ve got here in Canada, at least in the southern regions.
Check out their blog, book mark it, and, if you’re like me, live vicariously through their travels!
Copyright © 2012 - VanAussie Daily | Entries (RSS) | Comments (RSS)
WordPress theme designed by 
web design
