Sept 29 - Last Day in Vancouver

We are at Denver airport right now. Markus is queuing up, there had been a technical and UA uses a smaller plane now. Hope we'll make it. Meanwhile I post our images and insights of Sept 29th.

We got up very late this morning at about 09.00 – me that is. Got dressed and immediately back on the blog ;) It was miserable outside anyways. Realized that we hadn’t checked our mails for a while and obviously missed to answer some questions of an active blog reader, my sister Gitte. Back in San Francisco we used BART and MUNI for transferring to/within the city. BART is short for Bay Area Rapid Transit, MUNI is a public transit that is operated by the municipality of San Francisco (whereas BART is run by the Greater Bay Area and not the city). RV stands for Recreational Vehicle. On a side note: we will amend the blog step by step to feature maps and more useful information once we are back in Germany.

We walked our way down Robson Street and at Thurlow turned to go down to the seaside. Again lots of construction work going on. The Convention Center is being expanded and will host the media center during the winter games 2010. We continued on to Blood Alley (there used to be a lot of butchers around) as we wanted to check out SALT restaurant, a tapas bar. Delicious food and wine (we had a Sandhill Syrah) in a very basic yet warm ambience. Extremely friendly service. They offer choices of sandwiches, salads and soups apart from the tapas. For 15,- CAD you chose three cheeses or meats or a mixture of them as well as condiments to go with them (e.g. hazelnuts, olives, relish etc..). Or have the staff make the choice for you. A little hint: should you decide to go to SALT you might want to access Blood Alley from Carrall Street (almost next to the boot store). We entered from Abbot St. as I wanted to give myself time to think about buying the boots or not. Yesterdays credit card block could have been a sign, right? Finally, the costs of the broken window and the additional money we had to pay for the 400 or so kilometers convinced me to refrain from the purchase. It started to rain heavily while we were having lunch. We decided to return to the hotel earlier than planned, as we felt quite exhausted from walking around so much the past days. Got some coffee and muffins at Starbucks and here we are ever since trying to update the blog and upload the images. The latter is quite a challenge as the wifi at the room is rather low and I didn’t manage to access with an Ethernet cable. Meanwhile Markus is getting our staff ready for our early morning departure (alarm clock at 4.30, taxi at 5.00 hrs.). Expect us to be very tired but happy upon our return.

Weather forecast for tomorrow is heavy winds and lots of rain. This makes it easier to finish our BC vacation. Although I must admit that I am also looking forward going home and relax. You might smile about the word “relax”. Honestly, we are done. Our heads are full of impressions of spectacular landscapes and friendly folks and I guess we will need some time until settling in again.

Thanks to my mentor ;) Geoff Sturgeon. He was the one recommending I signed up with blogger.com. We hope you enjoyed traveling with us. It has been a different experience writing sort of a diary during vacation. Although I enjoyed it, I am not sure as to whether I’d be doing this again. As Ingo put it, writing a blog can be a real “time vampire”. The more so if the internet connection is slow making the upload of images quite time consuming. And this is why we haven’t uploaded the past days, yet. We hope to do this at Denver or Washington airports.