Vancouver

We left Seattle and headed up to Vancouver. We had some trouble figuring out how to get a reservation at a campground because it would have been 50 cents/minute to call there on our cell phones, and 70 cents/minute to call in Canada. We finally wised up and used Skype, which is really cool, and only costs 2 cents/minute to call non-Skype numbers in Canada and the US. We got to our campground nice and early, so we were able to spend most of the day in Vancouver. The only affordable campsites were well outside the city, so it was about an hour and 15 minutes by bus and train to get there, but we had a great time.

We went to Queen Elizabeth Park, which is a huge public park/garden that is beautifully and meticulously maintained. Here are a few pictures of the many many tulips.



Located at the park is Bloedel Conservatory, which is basically a greenhouse/biodome that houses many kinds of plants as well as some exotic birds. We happened to get in for free since we were asking (just out of curiousity, we wouldn't actually go there) about weddings in the park. The front desk woman said if we were thinking about getting married at the park or conservatory, we could just have a look around. So we saved $5 each! I got some shots of some of the birds, but I'm not completely sure what they were. First one is obviously a parrot of some kind. The second is, I think, a green canary, and the third is a yellow pheasant. I'm least sure of the canary... It could be something else entirely.




I have no idea what this plant was, but the picture came out really cool.



We went to Chinatown for dinner, but we actually had a really hard time finding any open restaurants! We walked around for about 20 minutes, getting hungrier, and decided on a place that had some really appetizing bbq pork in the window. The meal was decent, but nothing too exciting. We stopped at a Chinese bakery and got a bunch of little pastries for just four bucks, and they were way better than the dinner.

The next day was super rainy, and even though we wanted to go to a big park with Bebe and bike around, we figured we'd just have a lazy day and go the next day. The weather was forecast to be rainy for the next couple of days, and everything we wanted to do involved being outside, so we reluctantly decided to just leave Vancouver and get on with our trip. We had an interesting experience crossing the border back to the US. They had to search our camper because we had food, and they had to dump out all of our plants! We got to keep some of our herbs and arugula, but we had to completely forfeit the roots. They also took some potatoes and pears, but that wasn't a big deal. After about 15 minutes and losing some agricultural products, we got on the road and finally started our trip back to the east coast! Our next stop would be Yellowstone, which we will write about asap.

-Lily