We were a bit inconvenienced today by our scheduling, because we had to leave the apartment by 11:00 but our flight wasn’t until 18:00. In a hotel we’d just leave our bags at reception and come back later, but it’s much more difficult with AirBnBs. There are a lot of websites that let you sign up and leave your bags at shops around town, but I felt uneasy using them, so instead I found a bike tour agency downtown that also does luggage storage, so after packing everything we took off for the city center. This did mean we didn’t get to visit the Dr Sun Yat-sen Chinese Garden that was literally next door to our apartment, but it looked pretty small so hopefully we didn’t miss much!
After leaving our bags with a pair of extremely chipper Australians, we took a bus to Kitsilano, a neighborhood (named after an indigenous representative) southwest of Granville Island. 4th avenue has a bunch of shops and cafes bunched up together between streets all named after trees; they were nice stores, nicer than the thrift shops and tattoo parlors of Hawthorne Avenue in Portland, so we walked into a couple like Gravity Pope, a shoe store offering lots of different brands.
Before long, however, our interest waned so we took off north to Kitsilano Beach. This turned out to be a small but delightful beach surrounded by a green park, with an area towards one end with big logs laid down as benches facing the sea, and another area further away with lots of volleyball fields. A lot of people were playing, others were taking a stroll like we were, and some brave souls even went swimming in the sea! (I guess I don’t have any evidence suggesting the water was cold, but it must have been, right?)
The view was beautiful, too, as we could see the giant forested mountains in the distance; towards the right, Vancouver’s skyscrapers looked tiny in comparison. The sight was only marred by a dozen giant cargo ships scattered across the strait, impossible to ignore.
Continuing our walk, the path meandered so as to show us new angles of people rowing in their kayaks or walking their dogs, framed by the trees against the backdrop of the glass-covered towers of the city and the wall of mountains behind them.
We ran out of beach and then we ran out of park, so finally we walked back south to the commercial side of the neighborhood to have brunch sandwiches at a cafe, and then dessert brownies at another. That was a lightweight plan for a morning, but a morning well spent considering we needed to kill a couple of hours while still making out flight!
We went back to the city center to collect our bags. The place I chose had the advantage of being right next to a metro station, so we just rolled our bags over to the next street and took a driverless metro direct to the airport. Being in the front, the view felt like a videogame loading screen at first, and then like a roller coaster when the train came to the surface and started following its tracks uphill!
So that’s it for our Pacific Northwest holidays, as we are now safely at the airport waiting to board. It’s been an amazing time, and I’m happy to have come: I may have already been to Portland and Seattle, but I never felt like I was wasting time by being there again. On the contrary, I feel like I have deepened my understanding of the PNW as a distinct region, and of each city we’ve visited as its own character separate from the others. I can now recognize the Keep Portland Weird spirit or spot a Douglas fir on sight, and I hope I will be able to tell when a Hollywood movie tries to pass shots of Vancouver for New York or Chicago!
What will our next adventure be?
This Is A Lake 