Are we nearly there yet?

It’s finally not raining in Vancouver! So that means we have had a busy week walking around outside.

On Saturday morning we woke up, looked out of the window at Grouse Mountain and thought that this was a good place to start.

There is a gondola to take you to the top, but it’s expensive and the fully booked with skiiers, so we walked. It was warm at the bottom, but the ice and snow began about 1/3 of the way up. We saw lots of people in just trainers who had to give up at this point. We had our spikes strapped to our boots though, so it was a breeze… Well not really, it was still 800 m of up in about 2.5 km.

Two hours later, a sign said that there was still nearly 5 m of snow at the top. It’s going to take a while to melt! We had walked up with our snowshoes strapped to our bags so that we could go another 260 m up to Dam Mountain. It had snowed the night before, so this was lots of fun. The weather was a bit too good and we forgot the sun cream, so now have owl-eye tans.

After walking back down to the bottom, our legs were pretty tired and we didn’t manage much else that day. On Sunday we thought we’d go for a relaxing flat walk around Buntzen Lake. Unfortunately, so did everyone else in a 30 mile radius. We intended to go slow, but kept overtaking people and so had to keep up the pace for fear of them overtaking us later on (embarrassing!). We didn’t have time to stop for photos, apart from this one of the opening of a 3.6 km tunnel. Constructed in the early 1900s, it goes all the way through the mountains to divert water from another lake into Buntzen Lake for hydroelectricity purposes.

We’ve been out lots in the evenings too: into downtown Vancouver to sit on the beach, to Dog Mountain (again) and Bowen Lookout (near where Ollie has been skiing). We stayed for the sunset on both occasions – Ollie complained about his bum being cold.

We have two camping trips planning this weekend, one on a snowy mountain and one on a sunny beach – we will let you know which is best next week.