We’re writing this blog post now from tropical Costa Rica. Obviously we’re behind a few weeks in our updates! What follows seems like soooo long ago to us now that we’ve transitioned from cold winter snow to warm summer surf. We’ll catch up soon and post all about our fantastic time in Costa Rica so far – but here’s an update on our travels from Kelowna to Vancouver two weeks ago. And here’s a photo album for this portion or our time in B.C.
The final day of riding at Kicking Horse was filled with beautiful blue skies, warm sun and perfect corduroy runs. A great finish to our epic interior B.C. and Alberta tour riding 9 mountains in 3 weeks. We’ve put close to 1200 km on the rental car, which we now needed to return to Kelowna before our flight to Vancouver.
While in Kelowna we luckily had a few days to visit with friends from Halifax – Sarah and Wade. We enjoyed two days of amazing Okanogan wines and gourmet meals (Wade is a sommelier and both are total foodies). We especially loved the ‘Buddha Bowl’ dinner which we’ll be eagerly trying to re-create sometime during our travels. Sarah and Wade’s son Grayson entertained us with his musical performances. We also spent some fun hours at a huge indoor water-park that had a wave simulator in which Kai and Vea enjoyed testing their body-boarding and surfing skills.
Our flight to Vancouver arrived early in the morning, so we headed directly to Granville Island and beat the crowds for the Sunday market. Kari and I have great memories of Granville Island when we used to live in Vancouver, and we quickly found our favourite scones at Terra Breads – which tasted just as good as we remembered. It was fun showing Kai and Vea around the city, although it had changed a lot since we lived there almost 20 years ago.
On Sunday afternoon we circled Stanley Park and visited the Vancouver Aquarium – which got Kai and Vea very excited for all the marine life that we’ll be seeing in Costa Rica and Galapagos during February. In retrospect we should have put the $85 family admission fee for the aquarium into bike rentals instead. It was a beautiful sunny and warm day and Kai couldn’t get over the palm trees that we saw in English Bay.
Next we visited an amazing indoor trampoline park called ‘Extreme Air’ – a huge indoor arena filled completely with trampolines on the floors and walls. Being a Monday morning we had the entire place to ourselves and filled two hours with the pure and simple joy of bouncing and bounding from wall to wall until totally exhausted. That afternoon we decided to show Kai and Vea some culture, so we walked around China Town for a few hours to snack on Chinese dumplings and strange candies.
Tuesday we caught a ferry to visit our friends Danie and Yves who live on Salt Spring Island – one of the southern gulf islands located very close to Vancouver Island. The ferry is nick-named the ‘Nanny’ because it takes 3 hours to get to Salt Spring Island via Main, Galliano and Pender Islands. We were lucky to catch the morning ferry with Yves and Sacha who were returning from a hockey tournament on the mainland – so we had great conversation and catch up time during the entire trip. Our short visit on Salt Spring was a great opportunity to reconnect with Danie and Yves after over 15 years. We enjoyed meeting their kids and their amazing new entrepreneurial venture the ArtBarn International – a collaborative gallery, display and event space for viewing, making and talking about creative projects.
Upon returning to Vancouver we were happy to spend a few days with Brenda and John (Tony’s Aunt and Uncle) who shared some amazing stories from their previous world travels. We picked up some really great travel tips for Japan and Vietnam – which were both recent trips of theirs. John was very kind to give Kai and I tickets to the Vancouver Canucks game. It was Kai’s first NHL hockey game experience and he was amazed how fast the game was played when seeing it live – much different than watching on T.V.
Another friend we were able to see in Vancouver was Janne, who we met downtown after work and had an amazing sushi dinner. We got a table in the restaurant where everyone had to take their shoes off – which Vea found very amusing. We found it very embarrassing to have our stinky travel shoes together with Janne’s uptown Stiletto shoes.
Our final day in Vancouver was spent getting stocked up at Costco with food for our upcoming week of riding at Whistler with the Allen family. We’re meeting them on Friday at the airport and jumping on the Whistler shuttle. We can’t wait to spend a whole week snowboarding with these incredible friends from Halifax.
We also made a quick stop at MEC in Vancouver to buy a new Swiss Army knife. Kari forgot to unpack our previously owned knife (Kai’s Christmas present from Santa!) from her day bag when we flew out of Kelowna – so it was confiscated at customs. No room in our budget now for wine tonight!
Sounds like lots of fun packed into your days! Glad you where able to see Janne while in Vancouver. Liz heard from Unni this morning and Costa Rica sounds real hot, stay hydrated ! Keep the blogs coming, it’s great to see / hear about your adventures.
Awesome. The trampoline park looks like a lot of fun!