Le Tour de Stanley Park

Vancouver - July 27th

Well, now that the Tour de France is out of reach--in more sense than one: I just can't get the OLN channel on the hotel television and, well, you know that the whole thing has degenerated into the worst disaster anyway--we decided we'd go it on our own. Here's Ellie rounding a sharp, hilly turn in Stanley Park. It looks like someone has taken a nasty spill behind her, but she's carrying on regardless...

No, seriously, we did rent bikes this morning. Woke early, wrote the poem that you may have read in the previous entry, and made that very entry over a cup of coffee in the hotel room. Left a little later than usual, and stopped for a "proper breakfast"--Ellie satisfies this need with a munch on a muffin: I happen to prefer the proper variety--and found a bicycle shop near the entry to this wonderful park.

We were a wee bit wobbly to start with--we have not been in the saddle for more years than either of us can remember--but once we got the hang of things again, we did just fine.

Starting out along the coastal Sea Wall, we turned inland at the point where they have closed off the shore line, due to a damaging winter storm last year, and found ourselves riding through magnificent forest scenery,

past Beaver Lake, with its millions of water lilies covering the entire surface, and its water birds;

to Third Beach, where we stopped to admire the view, a brief nap under the pines for myself,

and a pleasant outdoor lunch
at the Sequioa Grill--and, by miraculous happenstance, ran into good friends and neighbors from Laguna Beach! Then on, along the Sea Wall, and through the bottom end of the park, past the Lost Lagoon, and back to our bicycle rental shop. The whole tour took us four and a half hours.

A walk up the hill back to our hotel, and time to wrestle with the task of getting our pictures from the camera to the computer, then choosing those you see here on the blog; a few minutes to prepare for an early departure in the morning, and down the hill for dinner at the Raincity Grill in Davie Village. An excellent meal, but for Ellie's steak--almost too tough to be edible. A good restaurant, they courteously excluded it from our bill. Then a walk around the bustling beach community another, differently spectacular view of the bay, and back to the hotel.