After three days when we had to get up, had to get packed, had to get out, and had to get some place by some time we found the freedom of our first day in Canada a little bewildering. John and I found it hard to focus on what we wanted to do first. The dogs and I seemed a little restless, so I suggested doing to complete circuit around Stanley Park on the seawall. John liked the idea, but was not sure his knee – he is still recovering from knee surgery – would like it. So I left him to explore West End and the dogs and I walked around the park.
For those who have not yet been to Vancouver, Stanley Park is the jewel of this beautiful city. Central Vancouver is a peninsula, and Stanley Park is the tip of that peninsula as it juts into the Straight of Georgia. Imagine Central Park moved from the middle of Manhattan to occupy the area from the Battery all the way to Midtown. A road goes around the edge of the park, and a low seawall protects the road. I think the road may once have been meant for cars, but today it is separated into two sections, one for pedestrians and another for cyclists. There are no cars in sight, only rocky beaches on one side and granite cliffs covered with cedar trees on the other. Talking pictures with two dogs is not easy, so I left the camera at home. Here are some stock photos I found on Google Images which give some idea of where the dogs and I were.
The seawall walk is a bit over 6 miles long, and our apartment is probably about a mile from the park. So altogether the dogs and I put in about 8 miles on this trip. I was a cool, overcast morning, so Edie did not complain about the heat like she sometimes does. We kept up a pretty brisk pace, and John was surprised when we were back in a little over two hours. I was still feeling pretty strong, but the animals, who are younger than me even in their dog years, seemed exhausted when we came back to the apartment.
In the afternoon, John and I went to Granville Island to go to the market there. This is a pricy place to get food, but the stuff they have there is just terrific and it’s a fun place to shop.
By this time it was after three o’clock, and unbelievably enough, we hadn’t had a thing to eat all day. So we found an outside restaurant there. I had fish and chip (the fish was great, the chips mediocre) and John had something which looked like a can of cat food mixed with weeds, but he assured me it was quite good.
Returning to the West End, we took a walk with the dogs to let them stretch their aching legs and answer Nature’s call. This neighborhood is a mixture of high-rise apartment buildings, smaller, older apartments, and a few single family houses. Once there had only been houses here, and a small park near us has some of these preserved to show what Vancouver was like around 1900.
I though this shot John did nicely juxtaposed the old and the new. I vote for the old!
The dogs were thoroughly and quite sensibly exhausted by this time, but the human were eager for more. One of the amenities offered by our landlord is free access to a local gym. John went there last year, but I did not. This time he checked out their group classes and discovered that they were offering mat Pilates. So I figured I’d go.
The facilities were pretty tired. It looked like it had been built around 1985 right at the height of the racquetball craze. There were several courts there, and not a soul playing on any of them. In fact, it didn’t look like anybody had played on them for some time. The weights equipment looked similarly clunky and dated. It’s funny. I don’t normally think of styles in exercise equipment, but I guess they exist. The Pilates class itself was great. Our instructor was named Hector. Coming from LA I just assumed that he was Hispanic, but he proved to be a small Chinese man. His accent made him occasionally hard to follow, but he was a superb instructor who really pushed all of us to do some of the hardest positions correctly. I really felt every muscle in my core when I left.
Before we left home, John had done some reading about the theater offering this summer in Vancouver. One of the plays that had received good reviews was A Closer Walk with Patsy Cline. John bought us tickets. It was the only disappointment of the day.
Patsy Cline is not somebody I grew up listening to, though I did know a couple of her hit songs. John was a lot more familiar with her than I was. All I can say is that she had to be a more interesting person than this revue – I really can’t call it a play – depicted her. Closer Walk is more hagiography than biography. In fact, after her death in the plane crash Patsy walks back on stage where she rises up on a hydraulic lift as the voice of a radio announcer says “God needed another star” or some similarly stupid line. Despite the wretched writing, the woman who played Patsy had a great contralto voice and the band was also quite good.
We finished the evening by going down to Davie Street where there was a street party, one of the events in the Pride weekend. I had no great expectations for this, and I was not disappointed. It had the usual number of marginally talented people singing covers of disco hits from the seventies and pop hits from the eighties and nineties. If you ever doubt the talent of Donna Summer all you have to do is listen to somebody pretending to be Donna Summer and she seems positively brilliant. After about a half hour of this, we stopped in a cheap Vietnamese restaurant and had some Pho. Unlike the faux disco on the street behind us, the noodle soup was truly “fabulous!”
