2023 Canada – Getting there

Welcome to everyone following along for another holiday. This one has been in the planning for quite a long time. We generally have a forward plan of the next 2 or 3 trips and having not done a big overseas trip through the ‘COVID years’ we decided that we’d get back to a longer trip this year. We did however shuffle the order of trips and when we were booking this one in as COVID was still a consideration. We chose a destination that had less COVID issues and wasn’t to close to a war zone.

So here we are in Canada. It has also been well documented that as travel has picked up the airlines have been slow to respond in providing value-for-money fares. We ultimately settled on the Singapore routing because it was far cheaper than the other options for this trip, but was quite a bit longer. With my commitment to the QAFLW (womens AFL) competition completed after Grand Final Day, we were ready to go the following Monday, notwithstanding also getting some work things completed. So it was champagne and coffee at the flight lounge as well as some nice food options along the way including a fairly tasty Lobster Thermidor on the Singapore to Vancouver segment. We arrived in Vancouver early on their Tuesday morning, making this definitely the longest Tuesday I’ve ever experienced!

We departed Brisbane at 11:50 on Monday night to Singapore and then to Vancouver… a total of 22 hours flying. We were able to clear customs quickly, but our second bag took over an hour to make it onto the baggage carousel. It’s one thing to paint your suitcases so they can be easily recognised, but another thing entirely to have the baggage handlers put it on the carousel. We cabbed from the airport to the hotel which is in the Vancouver casino precinct. It is very nice, but we were not so sure whether it delivered on all fronts. We paid an extra night so we could shower before having a ‘jetlag day’ of doing something while trying to stay awake. Vancouver was living up to it’s alternate name of ‘Raincouver’. We caught a ferry to Granville Island, primarily to buy some Lee’s Donuts, but also to check out the public markets which are known for their wide selection of fruit, vegatables, seafood, chocolate and baked goods.

The area where we are staying was all part of World Expo 86 and many of the investments still remain today. Two years later Expo 88 has held in Brisbane is solely responsible for the Southbank redevelopment that thousands of residents and visitors now enjoy. I’m not sure that the same energy has been delivered here or in other Expo cities we’ve visited, like Lisbon. In this part of Vancouver there is a lot of high-density living, it does seem to lack a community vibe. We walked back to the hotel after the markets because we both had run out of energy, so a little kip (rest) was needed.

The rest gave us the little boost we needed to take a walk to the downtown area where we were struck by a large number of homeless people. My research indicates the the issue has actually not got worse over the last 15 years and the same themes that we hear about at home like a lack of affordable housing seem to be the underlying cause. We finished our day with dinner at one of the local restaurants in the casino complex.

We’re hoping to shake off the jet lag tomorrow and in any case have to get going early to catch our ferry to Victoria where we will spend the next few days.

Until tomorrow!