Day 2 - Adventures in Vancouver

Victorian Hotel

We are staying at a nice and quaint hotel call Victorian Hotel. It's a very clean no frills hotel. We like it.

Covid Test

We had to do our Covid test today. It was a supervised self-test. Basically they watched us do it via a video conference. The whole purpose for this trip was to take the cruise so we were a little worried about the Covid test. But all is good.

Gina waiting on results

Gastown Walking Self-Tour

Now for our "Adventure". We decided to do a walking self tour around Gastown. We saw a couple of things that were noteworthy but our adventure came from some things that were not expected. We visited the Vancouver Lookout which is a 553 feet tall tower with a 360 degree view looking over Vancouver. From up there we can see various things to include Mount Baker which is in Washington state.

Vancouver Lookout

Sun Tower

Can you see Mt Baker in the hazy background

The Cruise Terminal

We also saw the Gastown Steam Clock. This clock runs on steam from a sidewalk steam vent. It was built in 1977 and is still in operation today.

We did go to the Maple Leaf Square only to find out that the statue of 'Gassy' Jack had been removed. Gastown was named after him. Nothing else on the official tour was noteworthy.

Now for the noteworthy items that were not on the tour that no one told us about. First we found that there are a lot of homeless people living in this area. We saw two parks that were primarily inhabited by the homeless. There were two aromas that were prevalent in this area: one being cannabis and the other was urine. We came across a sidewalk that was taken over by the homeless that was mostly tents. As we walked through this aria we saw drug use and what we think was a drug deal going down. We kept our eyes forward and moved quickly. We decided to cut out the last two destinations of our official walking tour to head back toward the hotel. But the show was not over. As we were waiting at a light to cross the road we saw two homeless men get into a fight. It ended with one man on the ground bleeding from his head while the other was yelling at him to leave. We decided to take a different route back to the hotel. I really wish I had my GoPro running during this adventure but I didn't feel it would be prudent to pull out my camera. I don't think the locals would of liked me recording their activities.

Devil's Elbow Ale House

Although if you ever find yourself in Vancouver, I would recommend the Devil's Elbow Ale House for a meal. It is a restaurant that prides themselves for serving southern cuisine food. One of the items on the menu was North Carolina Pulled Pork BBQ. Therefore we had to try it. While it was not the vinegar based BBQ we love, it was excellent.