🙂 Both simply stunningly beautifully located places with the mountains and ocean as backdrop
🙁 Not enough time to visit either Vancouver City or Vancouver Island.
The drive from Waterton to Vancouver had been a mammoth undertaking and we had vastly underestimated the driving time as the RV drives at about 50mph max! Never the less we finally arrived at the ferry terminal ready to cross to Vancouver island at 17h30. We ate our left over curry in the RV and then boarded the 19h30 crossing. It was spectacular.
We arrived at our accommodation at Midnight. Our next adventure can be found here: Knight Inlet
After Knight Inlet we headed to: Big Bar Dude Ranch
On arrival in Vancouver after our drive from Big Bar Dude Ranch we went for a Thai meal. The RV park was hideous – like a trailer park. We dumped our grey water and went to bed exhausted. We were up at 08h00 the next morning and drove to Grouse Mountain.
Paul, Pete and Trent ziplined – they said it was actually fairly tame compared to Go Ape! They still had lots of fun.
While the boys ziplined, the girls and I explored and did some shopping. We bought dream catchers as gifts for friends. We went to see the two orphaned grizzlies and then met up with the boys – one actually mock charged us! The other sat in the water playing with a piece of wood. Next stop was the Lumberjack Show – some may call it cheesy but we rather enjoyed it and were very impressed with the sawing skills demonstrated! We lost all our photos from here but I have shared some from the internet as this is exactly what we saw: axe throwing, competition to get to the top of poles, balancing on rolling logs in the water and statue carving – all quite cool!
We headed to All Drive to return the RV but it was all closed up. Dan from the Chinese Takeaway next door was very kind and rang for two cabs and said he’s sort out the garbage in the RV and return the keys to All Drive. We gratefully accepted (naively?!)…but all was fine. We raced to the airport where we had a chicken burger while we waited for flight. The flight over Seattle was incredibly beautiful with the pink skies, mountains and water…. we changed flights at Seattle for NYC. We had a day to kill in NYC and took the underground to the City. There was a huge Brazillian Festival in Times Square which was fun followed by a visit to the Natural History Museum. We decided to go back to Ellen’s StarDust Diner for a final visit.
Then back to the airport for our flight back to the UK. Charlotte’s luggage got lost for 8 weeks and travelled from NYC to Italy, to Hong Kong to India and back to NYC before finally making it back to the UK! Paul’s bag had been searched with a note left in it to say that his ‘dangerous item’ had been confiscated. It was a super expensive 30th birthday present: a cigar cutter and lighter – clearly just stolen. grrrrr. Never the less it had been an absolute fantastic three weeks covering wildlife, nature, cities, rail, flights and boats – Brilliant.
Go Back to: Glacier, Montana, Idaho and Washington
