Picks and Pans – British Columbia, Canada

Granville Island is a fairly touristy conglomeration of a pricey farmers’ market, some knick-knack/toy/t-shirt/souvenir shops, sprinkled in with a few art galleries and locally owned boutiques. Although this wouldn’t normally be our kind of gig, it does have a great pier for sitting in the sun near the water. It was also the first place we heard about the glory of the Canadian system of community centres. Thanks to some friendly advice from Sebastien at Hammered and Pickled, we discovered that nearly every neighborhood in Vancouver is the proud owner of a community centre in which weary travelers (even ones from the U.S.) can shower for free. The Canadians also use these centres for their gyms, swimming pools, ice rinks and other amenities. Hooray for socialism.

After leaving Granville Island, we headed over to Commercial Drive, a street vaguely reminiscent of Portland and San Francisco with a whiff of Greenwich Village thrown in. There are coffee shops, natural food groceries, vintage clothing stores, record shops, dive-y ethnic food restaurants, and even a park with the ever present identifier of the Pacific Northwest, a crowd of hippie/junkie/homeless folks. We felt right at home. Plus, the Britannia Community Centre gave us our first, very positive, and definitely cleansing, community centre showering experience. If only every city had such a service, we could live out of our van anywhere!

Smack dab in the heart of Commercial Drive, Turks Coffee Lounge is everything a Pacific Northwest coffee shop should be. Good coffee. Free internet. Friendly people willing to share outlets so everyone can enjoy the laptop love.

We hiked in from the east side of Lynn Canyon, which meant we were pretty much alone in our search for this great swimming hole we’d heard about. Thanks to Sean’s many years of experience finding swimming holes along the Yuba (his hometown’s river), we quickly recognized the telltale signs and made our way down to the 30 Foot Pool, a crystal clear and icily refreshing pool just below Twin Falls. After a quick dip (the water was a bit on the chilly side) we hiked up to the falls and were surprised to find a lot more people, probably due to the fact that we were getting much closer to the parking lot on the west side of the canyon. Just another reminder that the farther you get from people’s cars, the fewer people you’ll see. Lynn Canyon also has a very cool suspension bridge and, from the looks of people coming down to the parking lot with wet hair and beach towels, a few more swimming holes up river.

Relatively close to Lynn Canyon, Sushi Katsu did not have the most revolutionarily delicious sushi, but it was pretty quality stuff for the price. We got so much sushi for so little money, we felt compelled to gorge ourselves to the point of uncomfortability in order to finish it all. That one’s for you, Kobayashi.

For a moderately distanced day hike, this one was up there on the strenuous scale. It’s pretty much straight up, but you do get three summits for the work of about one and half. What really made our hiking day, though, was meeting up with fellow roadtripping hikers, Katja and Pamela. We spent a couple of hours just sitting on the granite face of the third peak talking with them and, had it been slightly more comfortable, we might have been up there all night. Just goes to show you can meet intelligent, creative, interesting people just about anywhere if you’re open to it.

Campground seemed nice, but we were really only there for the showers. Decided to stay for dinner plein air style because the picnic tables were right up next to the lake, a great little spot for relaxing and the swimming didn’t look too shabby either.

Perfectly acceptable coffee and wifi spot. A little short on the outlets (we almost unplugged their “Open” sign trying to get the juice for our laptops).

Vancouver is chock full of all kinds of gardens, but Queen Elizabeth is an example of our favorite garden variety…..FREE. It’s also set up on a hill with great views of the city and the gardens grow in the remnants of two old stone quarries which have been put to excellent landscaping use. It certainly made for an all around lovely afternoon.

We saw an ad in The Straight for this artist run show and decided to check it out. As with any artist run collective show, there was the good, the bad and the uninteresting. The most notable thing, however, was that despite Vancouver’s proximity to Seattle and Portland, the exchange of creative ideas seems somewhat constricted by the border. All the artists were from BC and didn’t seem to show outside the province. A bit surprising, I must say.

Decent coffee. Good location (on Main). Free internet. If the chairs had been a bit more comfortable and we hadn’t had our sights set on getting to the museum, we could have been there for hours.

Don’t get us wrong, we love nature, but dang if it didn’t feel good to be in a museum. We meandered around the Vancouver Art Gallery for several hours, enjoying each other and the intellectual flow that inevitably comes from being surrounded by other people’s ideas. We walked, we looked, we talked and ideas for future projects coalesced. And maybe, just maybe, I got a little homesick for NYC. On a few more specific notes, the architectural marvel of Reece Terris‘ Ought Apartment, which extended six stories up into the museum’s rotunda, examined our relationship with our living spaces and how time and consumer trends alter that relationship.  The Andreas Gursky retrospective introduced us to a photographer that plays with visual perception and whose manipulation of visual images runs the gamut from framing to well chosen vantage points to all out computer manipulation. I found the most interesting images were those that mysteriously teetered between traditional photo editing techniques and computer editing, the ones where I found myself asking if the artist could possibly have created this image without digital alteration. Although the clearly digitized images were compelling, I found, in his older pieces, a more interesting exploration of how images can be changed merely by perspective. There was also an exhibit of photos by Antony Hernandez, an L.A. based photographer, whose work depicts the cold and dirty isolation that can come for living in an urban landscape, but he accomplishes this by oddly intimate shots of strangers on the street. All in all, a good mix of work in a very well curated museum.

We got pretty lucky with this one. No cover, good food and 4 full hours of live music. Petunia and the Vipers cranked out swingy, bluegrassy, jazzy, countrified sound as we got to know a local postal carrier and his friend, a Vancouver restaurant owner. My only complaint: no dance floor.

At first, we thought, “Hooray! There is another option for wi-fi in this oddly named town besides the Evil Empire (aka Starbucks).” We even commented to the coffee shop owner what a relief it was that free wi-fi was available and explained the horror that is Starbucks’ wi-fi charges. However, after happily sipping our coffee and using internet for a couple of hours, the owner strangely flicked the lights on and off and then put up a sign stating that the shop’s policy was a $4 per person minimum purchase for wifi use. Our criticism of Starbucks apparently sounded more like a business plan than a complaint to this wily coffee shop owner. We chose to ignore this blatant policy change, but felt uncomfortable enough to wrap up our internet usage earlier than intended.