Day 2 - Vancouver

After 12 hours sleep I woke up feeling fresh, with no regrets about missing out on Nat’s bike ride around Vancouver. I was very glad to be feeling much better and ready for the excitement of the World Cup Final.

We were spending the morning the Capilano Suspension Bridge and Park so we decided to grab some breakfast from a lovely coffee shop next door to the hotel and get on the road. I noticed that there was a weird yellow fog over the city, Natalie dismissed it saying it would burn off but it was weird. I guess we just assumed it’s something that happens on the coast as we had experienced similar in Los Angeles and San Francisco, it wasn’t until later that we discovered that it was the smoke wafting over from some wild fires around BC, there’s been about 50 fires start over the weekend. I hope they don’t spread to where we’re going. I also hope the wind changes as the majority of this holiday is planned around spectacular views, so it will suck if there are no views.

We drove to Capilano over the Lionsgate Bridge, which obviously excited Nat. We noticed it seemed to be very skinny but that it was a very nice bridge! We soon got to Capilano, it had heated up nicely now, and there was no smoke here, yay. We walked straight past the queue for tickets, well done me for researching and pre-buying.

There’s lots of cool stuff to do at Capilano, we started with the suspension bridge as it’s the main attraction really, it’s a bit like the bridge that the winner of I’m a Celebrity has to walk over but with lots more people. It was extremely wobbly, we planned what to do if it collapsed, some would think the best strategy would be to Indiana Jones jump to the edge and cling on but we saw on Mythbusters that that wouldn’t actually work and to just cling to the sides, so that was the plan of action. Luckily we didn’t have to worry, the bridge worked and we crossed safely. The view from the bridge was really nice, I took loads of photos of the river, really I wanted to get down into it but you can’t, boooooo.



While we were there we did a treetop adventure, walking around some of the tallest trees on a platform fairly high off the ground. The trees were pretty tall, some of them were pretty fat, they were cool. I pointed out cool things, Nat took lots of lovely photos. We saw some birds of prey that were visiting for the day, including an owl and a couple of hawks, they were well behaved, phew.

We finished the adventuring with a cliff walk, which as the name suggests has a platform attached to the cliff side and you walk along it to get different views of the river. It was cool.

In the gift shop I resisted the urge to buy all the maple syrup, but we did get a t-shirt each and some new fridge magnets. How are we going to get all these souvenirs home?!

We decided to get some food while we there as it was such a nice setting and the atmosphere was lovely. I had a salmon burger, Nat had a salmon salad (and a lemon slushy!), they were really nice.

After we’d devoured our food we decided to head back to Vancouver, Nat wanted to stop off at Stanley Park as she was feeling bad that I hadn’t seen it but we hit a bit of traffic and I made the executive decision that getting back to the hotel, and to the stadium to soak up the World Cup atmosphere was more important. We knew it was going to be good because we’d seen loads of USA fans out and about, dressed head to toe in red, white and blue at 9am, however, as we got closer to the stadium the hordes of people was immense. We quickly parked up (well, we got our valet Keanu to park up), freshened up and headed out in to the crowd of chanting fans. USA, USA, USA!

We bought a flag ($5), joined the crowd and made our way inside, all the time surrounded by chanting and singing. It was brilliant. We made the way up to our seats, two rows from the very back of the stadium, but still a pretty good view.

Before we knew it, both teams were out warming up, it never occurred to me that they have to come out and warm up on the pitch before they officially run out of the tunnel to play the game. Soon enough, everything was set and the match began. I’m sure you watched the game, seeing as  the whole tournament has been brilliant and only losers would miss the final, but just in case you didn’t see it, I’ll just let you know that it was an absolutely incredible start, with USA scoring 4 goals in the first 15 minutes. The stadium was going nuts, out of the 53,500 people there, I think about 53,450 of them were American, or supporting the USA team (including us, seeing as Japan knocked us out of the final). It was an absolutely amazing experience, the game was brilliant, the atmosphere was insane and I even came away with a new chant… “I believe, I believe that, I believe that we will win!”



After the game, we decided to head to Gastown for a bit of a wander and some dinner. We had to walk through a bit of a dodgy area where we realised there is a very fine line between Hipster and Hobo.

We watched the steam clock, found the place where the founders of the city decided to call it Vancouver then went for some dinner at The Flying Pig. Nat had a bit more salmon, this time with risotto, I had an amazing seafood pasta dish. The restaurant was pretty hot (no aircon) so we paid up, went home, repacked our suitcases, wondered how everything fit in the suitcases in the first place then went to bed.