Vacation Recap: Vancouver

Vancouver, B.C., is one of our favorite cities, well, anywhere, and we were only too happy to return.

Day 1

• Hotel: The first night, we stayed at the Victorian Hotel, which Rob found via the Frugal Traveler column in the New York Times. The rooms are small and bathrooms are shared, but everything’s very clean, the staff is nice, and the location is great. (And the price is certainly right.)
• Toured The Orpheum, a historic concert hall (originally built for vaudeville and silent pictures)
• Yummy lunch at the new downtown Vancouver location of The Noodle Box (a local chain we’d first visited in Victoria on our honeymoon five years ago)
• Wandered down to Canada Place and the new convention center (built for the 2010 Olympics) and saw the Olympic flame (though it didn’t look lit up). The convention center boasts a lovely terrace with a view of Coal Harbour and the seaplane docks, and cool oversize lounge chairs to relax in the shade.
• Took the bus out to Locarno Beach, near Kitsilano Beach, so Rob could play beach volleyball with Meetup group he’d met during our last visit to Vancouver. I relaxed on the beach with some reading (a copy of The Stranger I’d picked up in Seattle) and took a lot of sunset photos.
• Stopped for sushi on the way back at Hitoe Sushi, a super-tiny restaurant with high Yelp ratings and a super-nice staff

Day 2

• Hotel: Moved to the 910 Beach Ave Apartment Hotel for the remainder of our time in Vancouver. It’s at the bottom of a slightly brutal hill, but very convenient to the water taxi to Granville Island. More importantly, our room boasted a small kitchen (with dishes, silverware and pots / pans) and a washer / dryer.
• Picked up picnic food at the Granville Island Public Market, got dim sum at Hon’s (Robson location) and mini-roadtripped up the Sea-to-Sky Highway. Will cover this in another post.

Day 3

• Went back to Granville Island for breakfast, then took a walk to Vanier Park.
• Took a tour of the Granville Island Brewing Company, complete with beer tastings. I rather liked their Island Lager.
• Joined our expat friends Doug and Mele for pubquiz at The Cove and did respectably well, even on Canadian geography questions. We had no hope, however, in the NHL lightning round.
• This pub served pulled pork poutine, a variation on a uniquely Canadian heart-clogging dish involving fries, cheese curds and gravy (and, in this case, pulled pork). It was amazing.

Day 4

• Breakfast pastries and hot tea at Tartine Bread and Pie., a tasty neighborhood bakery around the corner from our hotel
• Travel to Victoria, B.C.(subject of another blog post)

General Notes

• Connectivity: I bought a 50MB international data plan from AT&T for the Canadian leg of our trip, which meant I could use my iPhone when needed to look up maps, transit schedules and Yelp restaurant recommendations. Otherwise, to avoid costly international usage fees, we had to majorly ratchet down our habitual reliance on our “magic phones.” However, both hotels had (wired) Internet service, and wifi, while not ubiquitous, was more widely available than in previous trips (offered even in London Drug stores).
• Transportation: Our Zipcar membership also works in Vancouver, which made it very easy for us to take an afternoon drive up the Sea-to-Sky Highway. Vancouver also has an excellent bus system (also Skytrain, the subway/rail system, but we made less use of that). Between the book of bus tickets we bought at London Drug and Google Maps transit directions via my phone, we were all set to get around town.
• Credit Cards: A few years ago, Canada and parts of Europe started moving to a new kind of credit card involving embedded chips and PIN numbers. A number of restaurants we’ve been to in Montreal and British Columbia have these portable PIN pads that servers will bring to your table when it’s time to settle the bill. I haven’t had any problems in Canada so far with my American credit card (which has a magnetic stripe rather than the chip), but I wonder if it’ll be an issue if I travel to Europe. (I did have trouble using my American debit card as a credit card — credit card readers often wouldn’t accept it — but I could still use it in the ATMs.)
• Random Pet Peeve: Nestea became my mortal enemy. It’s oversweet and kind of disgusting. But if I ordered iced tea at a restaurant or bar, they’d serve Nestea, as if it was a valid substitute for real iced tea. The only place in B.C. that served a proper brewed iced tea was a tea shop at Granville Island. This wasn’t an issue on previous trips — though maybe I didn’t notice it before because I used to be more of a Diet Coke drinker / addict.

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