Vancouver Diary Part 1

Our main holiday this year was a fairly last minute minimally-organised trip to Canada. We went for just over 2 weeks, spending the first week in downtown Vancouver and the second week in Whistler.

I wanted to keep diary notes of our holiday as I have been doing over the past year or so, like I did for our road trip last year and for our Paris trip and our Featherdown Farms break earlier this year.

I hadn't taken any of my own gadgets so borrowed Richard's phone to make notes. As it was a new phone that neither of us were used to it turns out that I either didn't save or somehow overwrote my 'Part 1' notes - So I'm just going to have to remember using photos and make some notes of what I can remember.


Sunday 16th August 2015
Arrived exhausted in Vancouver after a 9 hour flight. Stunning views of mountains and glaciers from the aeroplane.

Journey was pretty good considering what a long flight it was and kids coped better than I expected.

Car looks great from car hire place. Hotel seems fine at first glance.

We all got an early night. The first night was tough in terms of jet lag as we all seem to wake up at midnight (as it would have been 8am in England at that point) and feel very awake but we forced ourselves to stay in bed until morning.

Monday 17th August 2015
Our hotel is Riviera on Robson street and is perfect for exploring downtown Vancouver. It is close to the beautiful Stanley Park too which is where we headed to today.

Black Squirrel at Stanley Park

The wildlife is amazing - Black Squirrels in the park and we even saw a family of wild raccoons. They walked by VERY close to us.

We found a couple of play areas including a fab splash play area - We were unprepared for that without swimsuits but that didn't stop the kids!

Later on we headed over the Lion's Gate bridge to North Vancouver to meet up with family we hadn't seen for around a decade. We popped to Park Royal Mall first. My Pink Lining Notting Hill tote bag with the fabulous Penguin Love print proved invaluable during our holiday - it came everywhere with us! (You can see my unboxing video of it here)

Miss T and my cousins daughter (I'm not sure of the terminology but think they are 'second cousins'???) soon made friends.

We ate out together at Gilaneh Iranian restaurant in Pemberton Avenue, North Van. It was great eating tasty Persian food again.

Tuesday 18th August 2015
D was desperate to go up Grouse Mountain so with clear skies and another warm sunny day, we decided to go.

This is a brilliant tourist attraction as not only is the gondola ride to the top exciting for the kids, but once up there, there is lots to do.

We enjoyed the Lumberjack show, the Birds of Prey show and had a great burger meal too.

And of course the real stars of the day were the two rescue bears who live at the top of Grouse Mountain.

We stopped off for some more water play at Stanley Park at the end of the day. This time better prepared with swim suits.

Wednesday 19th August 2015

Today I knew I'd miss Bake Off but then I realised that at the precise moment that GBBO was on TV screens in the UK, we were doing this in Canada and then I didn't feel so bad...

We knew we had to pack as light as possible for our holiday this year and when e-cloth heard that we needed some lightweight towels to take with us, they sent us each a sports & travel towel from their ebody range.

These towels are really lightweight and fold up very small making them ideal for holidays or for taking to the swimming pool.

I did my own little experiment when packing - The ecloth ebody sports & travel towel VERSUS a regular towel of similar size.

You can see just what an incredible difference it makes when rolled up. We needed to take 5 towels so by using the ecloth towels we saved oodles of packing space.

Although the towels aren't huge, they do dry really well so they were perfect for our trip to the outdoor pool at Stanley Park. We weren't able to carry a huge amount with us that day so it was brilliant being able to take a towel that hardly weighed much at all and didn't take up much space in our bags. 

In the evening we met up with family at West Vancouver Community centre and just hung out together, getting takeaway pizza for tea and just enjoying the evening. I got to see my other Aunt who I hadn't seen for about 13 years.