More Fun in Vancouver

We began our Friday morning adventures by touring the large area around the cruise terminal. The views of North Vancouver and the bay are wonderful, even from street level. Charlie captured these videos of seaplanes taking off and landing. We were surprised that it takes a long time (imagine almost a minute of video I clipped out) for the seaplanes to take off, but when landing, they almost stop on a dime upon touching the water.


 

We also got a close-up look at a French luxury ship designed for 250 guests and equipped with an icecutter for the Antarctic. This is Le Commandant Charcot.




If you Google the ship, you'll see that fares start around $24,000 per person, so it's definitely out of our league!

Then we walked uphill to the Pacific Center, a big shopping mall that covers two or three blocks on two levels. Holt Renfrew is a Canadian luxury department store, and I was startled in the shoe department to see a price tag of $1200 for what appeared to be an ordinary loafer. 

From there, we walked several blocks to a gourmet grocery store in search of a few items before heading back towards our hotel. We stopped for lunch at Riley's, where we enjoyed dinner the first night. We both ordered their fried halibut and chips, which were decidedly not your basic fish and chips!  We forgot to take a photo until halfway through the meal, but it still looks pretty tasty!

A couple seated near us are also on the cruise to Hawaii with us, so we chatted with then for a bit. They're from the Cincinnati area and look to be about our age. 

Here's one more photo of Fall in the city.

For dinner, we went to Hydra Estiatorio, a Greek seafood place, that was just a few blocks uphill from the hotel.  It was a beautiful place, and I loved the fish chandeliers.

We enjoyed the garlic prawn saganaki, a salad with kale, romaine, a dill-yogurt dressing, and a few other ingredients. and the pita with herbed olive oil. 

Garlic prawn saganaki

Romaine-kale salad

After returning to the hotel, we went up to the lounge again for dessert. Here are tonight's offerings, followed by pics of the candy and cookie options.


Only two types of cookies tonight!

The peanut M&Ms (back row) are my kryptonite. . . .

Tomorrow morning our bags will be transferred to the ship, and we'll board a little before noon, we hope. We have lunch reservations at Jamie's Italian!  

More tomorrow!


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