Meg and Greg’s Tag On Holiday

Yesterday we started our day at the Royal British Columbia Museum. The museum has many displays about British Columbia which could take days to peruse. Although these are interesting, this isn’t what we came to see. The museum has a special exhibition on the titanic. The museum has an entire themed section complete with boarding passes on entry. We started with a 45 minute IMAX movie about how the items were recovered along with the events leading up to the sinking. At the end of the exhibition we compare our boarding passes against the live and lost list. I was lost, Meg Lived. This was despite my first class ticket. There were quite a few themed actors going around the halls who had stories to accompany the exhibits.

Meg then had her first gelati for the day.

We decided to head to the west coast for the afternoon. I had read some interesting things about this part of Vancouver Island. After two attempts at finding the highway (which was clearly marked but did not match the maps we had), we ended up in the highlands and decided that was close enough. We ended up in an outlet district.

We came across a massive pet shop. This was the size of a Harvey Norman’s. You could even take your pets in to road test new toys, beds and for training. We even found this accessory.

 

We enjoyed Victoria and the B & B we stayed at was excellent. We knew this morning that we would need to get moving to catch the 11am ferry. The inn keeper had another idea and kept telling us stories about Victoria and the fishing and Canada and Taiwan and Sailing and and and.

Despite the delays, we caught the ferry. Strange thing is we couldn’t find any information about bus services from Tsawwassen to Vancouver except “don’t take public transport, it’s long, boring and complicated”. Turns out there is a shuttle service but tickets can only be purchased on the ferry for the first 30 minutes of the ferry trip. I did this and had to organise with the ship steward to get my baggage moved to the bus shuttle, The steward said “you’re Australian right? I don’t usually do this, but you guys are great, follow me”. He took me into the hold (through the Do Not Enter while ship is moving doors) and after breaking the baggage cart open and trecking through the cargo hold, followed by breaking into the bus to get my luggage on , we were all set.

We found our hotel in Vancouver. Another Hotwire.com booking. Learnt something if you’re visitng Canada. Canada has 2 taxes. Provisional and federal GST. If you are visiting, you can claim the GST when leaving the country. This applies to goods and short-term accommodation. Since a lot of our accommodation was booked online using USD, this doesn’t apply to us. However if you pay in a hotel, keep your receipt and then claim on the way out.

The hotel is a little out of town – 12 minutes on the bus, but at $100/night it’s a steel.

We came across a dog spa which also had exercise treadmills. We watched a dog being walking through the window iIthink he thought people going past outside were a result of his walking. He seemed happy enough.

We had a look around Stanley Park at the northern end of Vancouver. Today was 25 degrees with clear skies. We came across the beach facing English bay. We were amazed to see so many people stripping off and sun baking after work.

We had dinner in Denman st and I discovered a tasty maple syrup flavoured beer.

 

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 2:00 am and is filed under Canada. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.