Sunday, March 21, 2010

Olympics #3 - Vancouver with Meredith

Saturday, February 27th My cousin Heather and her husban Jared were staying with me so we met up with Meredith and took the West Coast Express Train into Vancouver together. It's too bad that WCE is primarily a commuter train (and therefore normally only runs at rush hour, they added extra trains for the Olympics). It's a beautiful trip and I wish it was more available to tourists. In Vancouver Mere and I went one way and Heather and Jared went their own. Our first stop was to get on the skytrain and take it to where we connected to the Bombardier Street car that they called the "Olympic Line". It was a test line that only ran during the Olympics to Granville Island. Again, something I think they should offer it year round. Granville Island was cool as always but aside from "Atlantic House", which had really long lines, there wasn't very much going on related to the Olympics so we got coffee and then got back on the street car and headed back down to water front.
Mere hadn't seen the cauldron yet, so we made our way over there. The crowds were kind of crazy and this was as close as we got. It looks so different in the day time!!! After seeing the cauldron we went for lunch at Steamworks. We actually ran into Heather and Jared outside the restaurant :)

From there we walked up to Robson Square to see the celebrations there. It was a grey overcast day and quite cool at times. It really didn't rain until later in the evening but it wasn't very pleasant.


We walked along Robson, stopping periodically to watch the events being broadcast and shown on a tv in practically every store. We got cupcakes at the Cupcake store and then spent some time in Chapters where it was warm and dry. This picture shows the Hotel Vancouver illuminated and towering over the Vancouver Art Gallery.
Because we didn't have a mapped out plan of what to do during the day, we ended up wandering quite a bit. Part of me wanted to stay and see the pyrotechnic show at Robson Square but by that time my feet were sore and I was cold so we decided to just catch the first train home.

No comments: