Day 21 - Closing The Loop

Or "Day 21 - Vancouver As It Should Have Been".

Or "Day 21 - Figure Of Eight".

Or "Day 21 - It's Not An Eight It's A ∞"

The very fact that I'm writing "Day 21" anything is kinda arrogant and decadent. Three weeks we've been out here, detached from the reality of our day to day lives, living instead a Canadian dream of sorts. But it had to come to an end at some point.

We set the alarm a little earlier than usual, and were out on the road by 9:30. We only really had one objective, and that was to get back to Vancouver with enough time left for us to take advantage of the good weather and get to the top of the Vancouver Lookout, and also revisit Canada Place. It didn't take long for the landscape to change as we travelled southwest from Kamloops down Highway 5; the hills soon became more verdant, the pine trees taking over once more, covering everything.

I'd estimated 3-4 hours for the journey, so we planned a stop-off at Hope, approximately two-thirds of the way to Vancouver. There we refuelled His Majesty, and bought some sandwiches and more chips for ourselves. [Note to English people travelling in North America - "crisps" don't exist in Canada. If you want crisps, you ask for chips. If you want chips, you ask for fries.] We drove a short distance to Kawkawa Lake, a totally unsung jewel in a province that is littered with such lakes, and ate our lunch there; you could almost see the "last day depression" hanging over the two of us.

The last stage of the journey re-introduced snow-covered mountain tops as we approached the Coastal Mountains, and then we got stuck in more construction about 15 miles from Vancouver, slowing us to almost a crawl for about 30 minutes. So it wasn't until 3pm that we made it back to the carpark opposite our first hotel (the same carpark in which I'd had a fit with the sat nav when it couldn't pick up a signal almost three weeks ago). We paid for two hours' parking, and headed down to the Vancouver Lookout. It hadn't been worth considering it when we were last here, as the weather had been so dull that the views would have been rubbish, but now, with blue skies all around, the prospects were as good as they could ever be.

Fifteen dollars each secured us tickets that we could use all day (or in our case, any time in the next 1 hour and 45 minutes). We got into the lift, the doors closed, then the ground fell away and the glass front of the elevator revealed the city-scape sliding past, downwards, at a sickening rate. I had to turn away initially, it wasn't fun for me.

At the top though - as is usually the case - the views were stunning. There were few clouds in the sky, and Vancouver and the surrounding area - the harbour, the north shore, the towns of Burnaby and Richmond, the Coastal Mountains, the distant Mount Baker - were all visible (except maybe Mount Baker, the jury's still out on that one). The views were worth the wait.

And then just one thing left; Canada Place, this time with its brilliant white sails set against a background of blue sky, rather than the grey and wet skies that we'd had last time we were here three weeks ago. It was a bit of a photo op, a bit of a trophy-gathering exercise, but we were both glad we'd seen this city in proper summer weather, not just the dank wetness we'd experienced before.

Then back to the carpark with 5 minutes to spare, and the sat nav (which overall has been a bit of a star this holiday) took us to our 14th and final hotel, the Sandman Signature (Airport) hotel. We unpacked everything out of His Majesty, and the sat nav did its final duty, guiding us to the Avis rental car collection point at the airport, where an attendant waved a handheld device at us and told us that we'd done 1,861 kilometres in our vehicle (so that's what the ESP button on the dashboard was for).

1,861 kilometres in HM, approximately half that in F, 700 miles on the train, and just over 300 miles on the ferry - a grand total of 2700 miles, about the same as we did in Alberta.

We got a taxi back to the hotel. "You guys don't have any luggage?" "No, this is the end of our holiday, not the start." Damn, I must stop saying that.

We ate tonight in a Chop steak and fish bar associated with the hotel (not a Moxie's!), both of us ordering far too much and not finishing it all. And now we're sitting in our Sandman-supplied white linen robes, Sandra on our balcony and me just finishing off this blog.

But how do I end a blog like this? How do I sum up my feelings of the last three weeks? How can I get over to people the kind of time we've had? There are these words, and there are the pictures up on the Flickr site. But oh it's been so much more than that. Remember the whale-watching? Did you know that Sandra didn't sleep properly the night after that day, because she was still so excited at what we'd seen? Remember me floundering for the words to describe being alone on Deck 7 of the MV Northern Expedition, a quarter of the world on one side of me and a quarter of the world on the other?

I thought I knew what I was going to get from British Columbia, but it's batted me right out of the park. I wasn't prepared for the size, the scope, the enormity of the place; I wasn't prepared for the people, how friendly, genuine and helpful they've been; and I wasn't prepared to have quite this much fun with the person I love most to share these things with, my perfect foil.

We fly back tomorrow, so I guess that's me done. For now, anyway...

Thanks for reading.

This is British Columbia, signing off.