Time in the city

We spent the next day relaxing, taking in the city of Vancouver, shopping and taking LOTS of pictures. So brace yourselves!

Rob had a long run that morning, so Matt and I headed to a local coffee shop after a much shorter run! And Linds got caught up on some much-needed sleep after dealing with serious jet lag and time changes and difficulty sleeping in the condo. (One thing we didn't think about when booking the place was making sure it had AC....many places in Vancouver don't have AC because it rarely gets warm enough, but of course it was one of the warmest weeks on record when we were there.)

Can't get this at a Starbucks!

One of my favorite things...enjoying a great latte with this guy on a beautiful morning outside.

The views from our condo, high atop Vancouver....you can see the water just in front of the mountains in this picture.

The view from the other side of our place

And the view down...we were on the 33rd floor of a 35-floor building

 (there is a story to this to be told later)

(This is the building right across the street....the picture above was my attempt to show how tall it is..and focus on the group of people in the picture below..

Their place was directly across from ours (up 33 floors remember) and this seagull landed on the balcony. We watched as this guy got closer and closer to try and feed it some food out of his hand. And it worked! Amazing!

One of the things we noticed about Vancouver were the rooftop gardens on virtually every building. So I took pictures of a few of the patios we could see from our 33rd floor view.

This was the street that our condo was on...isn't it beautiful?

And this was what I looked like for a good portion of our trip...lens in hand and asking everyone to stop for a minute while I took some pictures.

Downtown Vancouver is surrounded by water on three sides, so we walked along the water for a mile or two and saw more of the city. I saw a dragon boat for the first time (see below). Apparently they are fairly common in New Zealand as well as BC...not so much in the midwest!

We took a ferry across the water and walked around Granville Island for several hours. 

Walking around inside the 'indoor farmer's market' on Granville Island

I took this picture with my cell phone, but it was some type of fruit that one of the vendor's told us was her favorite, although it looked so dull and boring on the outside. We bought one and once she opened it for us (since we didn't know how to), those white parts broke off into sections and it was amazingly sweet. Linds and Rob, do you remember what that was called?

The architecture, the lights, the street signs, the colors....I couldn't get enough!

The view of downtown Vancouver from Granville Island

I took a picture of these two boys on our walk back to our place. The weather was unusually warm for Vancouver (upper 80s) and people were outside everywhere! As you can see in the background, they were sunning themselves on any open space of grass they could find. And these two smart businessmen took advantage. Yes, they were definitely businessmen. We stopped to buy a glass of lemonade (because I promised, many years ago, that if I ever saw kids selling lemonade, that I would stop and buy a glass....if they went to all that trouble, they deserved a few customers). Anyways, we stopped to buy a glass and they had a stand, complete with a kid's cash register and all. When we asked how things were going for them, the older kid said to us, "Business is good. It's been a good day today." Crack me up!

We also saw some amazing cars in Vancouver, many of which cost ridiculous amounts of money, but were still fun to see nonetheless. I had to take a picture of this one for Wyatt, since he loves cars so much.

We had dinner reservations at a really nice place right along the water called C. They are known as a great seafood restaurant and we had to take in some prime seafood while on the coast. I took several pictures of the interior of the restaurant as well, though. They had an indoor area with large doors that were open to the outdoor seating area, which was where we sat. But check out the 'Burberry-esque' painting on the ventilation system! 

Looking into the restaurant from outside

Great company for a great dinner

The harbor was directly behind Matt and I

Yum...scallops and oysters, among other things we enjoyed!

And check out these tables! This was in the waiting area...don't get too comfy and sit down, but you can lean while you wait!

We ended the evening with a walk along the seawall over to English Bay--an area where there was going to be an extravagant display of fireworks that evening as part of the annual Celebration of Light fireworks competition held annually in Vancouver. It's actually the largest offshore fireworks competition held in the entire world and they have several countries that compete over several nights to win the competition. This was the final night and we were initially excited when Rob discovered that it would be taking place while we were there. BUT when we saw how many people there were and realized that it wouldn't start until close to 10pm and we had to be up by 5am to catch the train to Seattle, we opted out. And boy are we glad we did, considering what happened that evening. 

So remember when I said that our condo was on the 33rd floor of a 36-floor building? We were initially pretty excited about that fact...until our last evening there. We headed back and packed up all our stuff so that we would be ready to go in the morning when our alarms went off at 5am. We finally got to bed around 10:30pm after laying awake and sweating from the stifling heat with no AC. But we got to sleep...only to wake up around 1am to a strange beeping/horn-type noise. I initially thought it was my phone alarm going off or Matt's watch, but when I got out of bed, I noticed that there was a small light going off simultaneously with the sound in our bathroom. Lindsay and I met outside our rooms, barely coherent, and walked out into the hallway of our condo. Yep, you guessed it--FIRE ALARMS!! I have to say it was the oddest sounding fire alarm I have ever heard, but when we saw the lights going off in the hallway, we new we needed to get moving. We assumed it was a false alarm, but you never really know, so we gathered all of our passports and essential papers into a bag and started to head down 33 FLIGHTS of stairs! We didn't see many people in the stairwell and as we were running down, I started thinking to myself, "What if this is real? What if there really is a fire and we get trapped in this building?" And just as I start thinking that, we hear a woman's voice just a few flights of stairs down from us yell, "Oh! It's so HOT!"
And that is when the adrenaline fully kicked in for all four of us....HOT=Fire and this is for real. We are only at about the 20th floor and we are going to get stuck above this raging fire. All we could think was, "RUN, RUN, RUN!"
Once we got down to where that woman was, though, she told us that it was a false alarm and that this has been happening every week for several weeks. Her 'hot' comment was in reference to the heat in the stairwell since it was so hot outside. But by this point we were going to just trust some woman and walk back upstairs, so we made our way outside and sat out there for about 30 min. Then we waited in line for at least another 20 min. to get back upstairs, since there were only 2 elevators for the entire building! And you can imagine how amped up we all were once we got back to our place. I have no idea how long it took us to get back to sleep and fully calmed down, but it seemed like an eternity. And that 5am alarm came WAY too soon! Needless to say, we were all exhausted on the train ride but VERY thankful that it was indeed a false alarm. It really makes you thankful to have a house, though, and no longer have to deal with apartment living. I had actually forgotten about all the wonderful nuances of living in apartments but was reminded of how thankful I am to not have fire alarms going off in the middle of the night anymore!