July 2 - Public Transportation Day in Vancouver

This is one of the SeaBuses

Grouse Mountain

View of North Vancouver - Radiance of the Seas cruise ship on the left.

The hillsides are covered with housing.

I did not hear a train after about 11:00 last night until about 7:30 this morning. I guess that is livable. We decided to try out the public transportation today and see if we could get around. We bought our $9 public transportation day pass and hit the trail. We first caught a bus that took us to a SkyTrain terminal.

We rode that to Lonsdale Quay where we caught the SeaBus over to North Vancouver. We then caught a bus up to Grouse Mountain. We looked around and found out it costs $39 plus 12% tax to ride the gondola up to the top. The price would include seeing a grizzly habitat (have seen them in their real habitat), a birds of prey show (have seen that at Dollywood), and a lumberjack show (which greatly interested Phil). We may end up going back to take the ride and going to see the lumberjack show. We’ll see.

We stopped off at the Capilano Suspension Bridge and got a brochure on that. That was $34. We just wanted to get a photo, but you cannot see the thing without going in. We rode the bus back to Lonsdale Quay and went into the Quay Marketplace. It has some retail shops and every kind of international food at their food court. We opted for a calzone(me) and pizza)Phil). We bought the grands Vancouver t-shirts.

I took some photos. It was neat watching the seaplanes take off and land. Also, the Radiance of the Seas cruise ship was docked near the SeaBus port. We saw large container ships in the harbor, too. It was just a neat day, and we had a good time.

The only glitch was when we got back to the bus terminal, and we realized that we really did not know which stop we should exit the bus. We kindly explained to the driver that we were from a one stoplight town in East Tennessee, and we did not know exactly how to tell him when we needed to get off and we did not really know where we were supposed to get off. He said he’d let us know and had us sit up front (reserved for the handicapped).

I know we want to go to Stanley Park one day. We learned that Whistler Mt. is about a two hour drive from Vancouver. Also, the Burnaby Lake, which is quite large, is very close to our RV park. It has a nice trail and is supposed to be good for bird watching. We are going to explore the Internet to see what else is out there for options. Heck, we could spend another day doing just what we did today. It was fun! The SkyTrain goes underground some, but I much prefer when it is above ground. Underground is loud. We said several times that the grands would have loved today - the bus rides, the SkyTrain rides, and especially the SeaBus rides.