On the way up I-5 to the border we passed these incredible evergreens. The ones on the right are growing straight up a rock cliff, so thick you probably couldn't get a hand between them. Washington's name is the Evergreen State for good reason. This state has the biggest variety of evergreens we've ever seen, and they're all gorgeous.
Getting through the border check took about 25 minutes each way. We'd hoped for better but it could have been much worse. We saw a 5th wheel in the penalty box for our entire 25 minute wait coming back into the U.S. When we got up to it there was no one around. We wondered if the owners had been hauled off to the pokey.
Coming into Vancouver with its skyscrapers and electric bus lines overhead.
I knew we wouldn't have much time to go to various places in the city so chose Stanley Park as our one destination. It's a beautiful area which is highly rated on TripAdvisor.
These are some of the high-rise apartments which overlook English Bay near Stanley Park. They all have a glorious view.
I usually do enough research on where we're going so I'll know what we should see and how to get there. For some totally unknown reason I failed to do it this time and as a result we missed all the best parts of the park and ended up spending the majority of our visit stuck in downtown traffic. However, we did get to walk around the seawall for about 45 minutes where we enjoyed the view of the bay.
View of West Vancouver from the Stanley Park walking path.
A few of the 15 freighters which were parked in the bay. We couldn't see the harbor from where we were but figured they were probably waiting for spaces to open up at the docks. They were riding very high in the water so would have been picking up cargo.
There are both walking and wheel trails around the entire park. Wheels get the inside track.....bikes, roller blades and one guy cross-country skiing with wheels under his skis. Walkers get the outside path. Maybe that's to stop the cyclists from going over the edge into the water if they wreck. We saw a bike with no rider but lots of red on the pavement near it. Thought the owner might have wrecked until we realized it was berry juice and she'd been off picking berries.
There was one area where the gulls were congregating with the usual gull behavior of he-who-has-food getting chased by those-who-don't. We watched several battles with the food changing possession frequently. This fellow was in a bit of a predicament on the rocks just below us. He had a sea star in his mouth which was evidently too big to swallow.....he kept trying but wasn't making any progress. There was another gull about two feet away trying to figure out how to get it. We watched them for a while but neither of them came up with any new ideas on either how to eat the sea star or how to steal it. I wish we could have seen the outcome but it could have taken hours.
Once we arrived at the park we quickly discovered all the parking lots had meters which were $3.25 per hour (fortunately they did accept credit cards). We decided to park and walk down the sea wall for an hour, go to lunch and then return to see the rest of the park. This plan did not work out. We wanted to go to Tim Horton's (which, for those unfamiliar with Canada, is the best, fast, non-fast food in the world). There were numerous Tim Horton's within a mile so we thought we'd easily get into one. Wrong. Vancouver is not designed for humongous dually pickups. The lanes are barely big enough for one to get through and there is ABSOLUTELY NO PARKING ANYWHERE. Yes, there are meters on most of the streets but the lanes are so narrow a dually can't park there. We never saw a parking garage but couldn't have fit in one anyway. There apparently are no surface parking lots which is all we can get into. The city is designed more for pedestrians than vehicles, so every time a light changed there were hordes of pedestrians crossing and the vehicles couldn't make turns. One or two vehicles could make a right-hand turn per light.
The Pacific Center, a very attractive building which (we think) contained a Tim Horton's. We'll never know for sure.
A view of traffic in the downtown canyons of buildings. I wish I could have got a picture of us squeezing between the huge electric buses and whatever was in the next lane. It was nerve-wracking to say the least. Jim did exceptionally well, though.....he didn't take off anyone's mirrors (or our own) and, most amazing of all, he didn't even swear. Don't know what got into him.
Every street seems to be packed with electric buses and the sky overhead is a maze of their power lines. The buses take up almost every inch of whatever lane they're in, often coming across the white line into the next lane. This made an already difficult situation even worse.
By the time we came to the realization that there was no place in the entire city we could park, and therefore there would be no LUNCH, we were in no mood to struggle back through all that traffic to see the rest of Stanley Park. Fortunately we had taken our usual "travel lunch" with us in case of emergency (crackers, water, chips and a banana....sounds like prison fare) so we didn't starve, but our nerves were seriously frayed and all we wanted to do at that point was get away from the traffic and crowds.
On our way both into and out of Vancouver we passed many blocks of houses which had these beautiful evergreen privacy screens. There are houses behind the trees and shrubs in the picture but we could see only little bits of them. This is a busy main street with lots of traffic but the houses are totally private. After talking with the manager of our RV park, we believe most of the screens are Emerald Green Arborvitae which are fast and thick growing. There was a row of them at our last campground in Yakima which completely blocked out the noise of a main road which ran on the other side.
Coming back to Mount Vernon on I-5 we got a good view of Mount Baker (10,781'), the northernmost of the volcanoes in the Cascade Range. It has the second-most thermally active crater in the Cascade Range after Mount St Helens. Considering what happened to Mount St Helens, that is not a comforting thought. Wish I could have got a picture of it without telephone poles in the middle but you take what you can get when going 70 mph.
Vancouver is a lovely city but it needs to be explored and enjoyed on foot and by taxi (of which there are thousands). It is not the place for people with an over-sized truck who would really rather be at the far reaches of North Cascades National Park. Someday we might visit it again, but not by driving ourselves into it.
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