Vancouver, a City of Many Heights, Sunday April 15th, 2018

After a great night of sleeping in an extremely comfortable bed, we woke up to get ready for a day of city touring. We met most of our travel mates in the lobby before getting picked up by our motor coach at 8:45 AM. We had a very entertaining bus driver (named Bill) who first took us into Stanley Park where we stopped to visit the very artistic totem poles.

We toured the city including sites of the 1986 Worlds Fair. Expo 86, was a World's Fair held in Vancouver. The fair theme was "Transportation and Communication: World in Motion - World in Touch", was held on the north shore of False Creek. It still stands as the last World's Fair to be held in North America.

We also drove by some of the sites used for the 2010 Winter Olympics where approximately 2,600 athletes from 82 nations participated in 86 events. We saw where all the athletes lived and the bus driver told us it was an awesome site to see the flags of so many nations hanging out the windows of the Olympic village apartment buildings.

Before long we found ourselves at Canada Place, a multi-million dollar facility where cruise ships dock at the edge of town. We noticed all sorts of things to do (within walking distance) once a passenger exits the ship. Our group was all treated to the Fly Over Canada attraction. This attraction was a was an amazing experience where you feel like you are flying over the country from east to west. It is a bit of a 4D experience where you'll feel the water soaring over Niagara Falls, you smell the wheat of farm fields as you hover over combines harvesting the fields in central Canada. You may need to close your eyes in the Canadian Rockies as the cliffs you fly over can be overwhelming.

  After our visit we were taken to Granville Island where we had a great seafood lunch and browsed around the arts and crafts stores before heading out to the Capilano Suspension Bridge Park. Peg had stressed over this for a while knowing it was on the agenda. Bouncing and shaking the whole way, we made it across the bridge only to find there was a tree top adventure awaiting us on the other side. People basically go up a stairway along side a mountain to about 40 or 50 feet high and then you  take a series of small suspension bridges from tree to tree. The rope bridges swing and bounce and sway....all to Peg's dismay. Eventually Peg just raced to the front of the line and walked around or through anything that got in her way. She clearly was on a mission, and that was to get down. The Douglas Fir trees supporting the tree top adventure were anywhere from 200 to 250 feet tall!


















After we boarded the bus for a short ride back to the hotel, we had a chance to relax before the group cocktail party at the Sheraton Hotel a few blocks away. The Wall building where the Sheraton is located represents the tallest point in the city but is not the tallest building, it just happens to be at the top of the hill in the center of the city. We took some great sunset pictures at the Sheraton and met some of the Rocky Mountaineer management team before heading back home for an early night in anticipation of the train leaving the station in the morning.