Day 2 - Bill Shatner has avoided me all day

We both woke at about 5 o'clock this morning, then dozed, lying in bed with our eyes closed rather than sleeping, for a couple of hours. No surprise really, our bodies thought it was mid-afternoon. We gathered ourselves at 7 am, and watched the demise of the England World Cup campaign. I suppose it was a mercy killing really; at least now we won't have to concern ourselves about future matches as we roam around British Columbia.

We got up then and had breakfast at Moxie's. I elected to go for a huge sausage hash with poached eggs and hollandaise and potato rosti and toast; hey, I'd not eaten for twelve hours, I fancied a Man v Food moment (and in this battle, Man won).

Then out into a rather damp Downtown Vancouver. We made our way over to Canada Place, looking out over the harbour to the northern part of the city where it clings to the foothills of the Coastal Mountains. The mountains themselves were hidden by low clouds. The huge white sails of Canada Place lost some of their magnificence against the backdrop of white clouds instead of blue sky, but it's still an impressive building. We met some Texans from a cruise ship that was docked there. They wanted us to take their picture with the sails as a backdrop. "Are you guys from Australia?" they asked.

We continued our walk around the harbour area, discovering a huge Killer Whale statue that looked like it was made of Lego, watching the seaplanes take off to give sightseers a view of this city from the air, and at one point sitting outside a hotel that had important looking security guards at the door, just to see if Bill Shatner came out.

He didn't.

Still not really wanting lunch, we made our way to Gastown, the oldest part of Vancouver, and so named because of Gassy Jack Deighton (who in turn was so named because he liked to talk a lot and tell stories). The Vancouver International Jazz Festival is going on here at the moment, so we listened to one band for a while, before moving further into Gastown where we had a coffee and a snack. We then watched a street performer do an impressive escapology trick ("that has to be worth ten bucks!" - we gave him $5), before making our way to the far end of Gastown where another band was playing. I'm not a huge jazz fan. I can appreciate the skills that go into it, but I don't enjoy listening to it; for me, it's the aural equivalent of reading a text book.

So we came back to the hotel, where Sandra fell asleep while I sorted through some photos for the Flickr site, and then read for a while. Then, both feeling tired and not quite sure if we were hungry or not, we made our way to a Keg restaurant where I mimpsed my way through an averagely prepared ahi tuna steak, and Sandra wolfed an enormous grilled chicken dish.

[Aside - the observant among you will have noticed that I've learned how to put embedded hyperlinks in this blog; just click where you see underlined text, and it will take you to a page with more information on that topic.]

We had a final walk down to Canada Place and through the railway station (which we'd only peeked into briefly earlier, when we were trying to find a toilet; they have a hair dresser but no toilet, go figure), then made our way back to the hotel.

I thought I'd given Bill Shatner a fair chance to show himself, but he didn't take me up on it.