stanley park rawks!

it's taken me far too long to get round to putting up the trip round stanley park, so i'm going to take the lazy route and do another photo essay. i know youse all just look at the pictures anyway. . .

so i rode down to meet VTA after she finished work at the museum, and we walked up to stanley park, where VTA hired a bike and we set off. stanley is a huge big park on a sort of outcropping of land (there is totally a word for that, but it escapes me - help?) so you go from inner city to wilderness in about five minutes. view of the city from the park:

look, a sea plane! also in the background, i suspect my uni is on that little mountain in the middle (much further away than it looks) and there is a bridge mostly hidden by the plane, which i crossed a couple of weeks ago on a ride to deep cove:

we saw more spectacular mountains:


VTA admiring some of the destruction from the big storms in winter:

we took a detour through the middle because of the paths still being shut, which lead us to beautiful little beaver lake:

it got a bit steep in the middle (look at the size of the trees!):

i took us on a long detour to find the place with the raccoons, which got us lost and questioned by the police (actually! but they only wanted to know if we had seen "the man in the photograph" - only if he'd been disguised as a jogger). so we didn't see any raccoons, but i did okay on the canadiana check list anyway. thus:

oh the canadianness of it all:

then we went to a pub and drank "the special" while sitting under a canadian club umbrella, next to a fake gas fire while hockey was playing on big screen tellies. afterwards we went to tim hortons and had timbits. bring me my toque!

"so here's montreal, right, and that's toronto. . . "