BTDU

With today being our last full day in Canada – we fly to Heathrow tomorrow departing at 6.30pm – Plan A was to go Nordic Skiing on the local Cypress Mountain, where conditions had morphed from poor to excellent over the last week…

…and this was confirmed by our views from L&R’s deck…

However, after engaging our brains and not our hearts, we concluded that the risk of getting injured – exacerbated by my balance issues – the day before 9 hours of flying was too high, so Plan B came off the bench!

This simply meant leaving the car and exploring the local neighbourhood, which sits on the South side of the Burrard Inlet…

Our walk started on the Trans Canada Trail…

…and we walked west towards 2 of British Columbia’s most famous bridges…

The Ironworkers Memorable Bridge owes it’s name to the tragic loss of 19 construction workers, who perished when the bridge collapsed during construction…

This is how our walk towards these 2 icons unfolded…

…and whilst we were there 2 Canadian Pacific Railway goods trains pulled and pushed 110 containers, painstakingly slowly, over the bridge towards us…

…many of which were daubed with some stylish street art…

We then turned south taking in the colour and varying styles of the heritage homes in this part of Burnaby city…

We then climbed the steep back roads to find ourselves, once again, on the 6 laned Hastings Street where, in the sunshine, more street art was on display…

…and one particular building drew our attention…

…which led us down the Sufism rabbit hole…

After leaving Hastings Street, with its colourful apartment blocks…

…we headed back to basecamp, noticing, not for the first time, how much the design of new build homes has been influenced by the architecture of the original heritage homes…

Upon returning, the North Coast Mountains looked even more appealing – and we both had a tinge of regret that we had chosen, albeit correctly so, not to go cross-country skiing up there….

Leith and Rob were both home, so we, almost inevitably, started discussing the logistics of our potential next trip here 😊🇨🇦 before the mundanity of getting a final wash load done, checking in with Air Canada and tackling the “quart into a pint pot” challenge of packing called…

However, the “delight” of all these tasks was more than compensated for when we served a meal of Sockeye Salmon, another first for both of us…

…and it was superb – I’m afraid Atlantic farm salmon will never cut it again…

We took one more look at the mountains at sunset…

… before “heading up the wooden hill to Blanket Bay” where we were comforted to know that all our clothes were clean, our check-in was ultimately successful and that, thankfully, we had managed to get everything packed and within the 23kgs maximum allowed…but we will be wearing a lot of clothes on our flights…😉🇨🇦🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿✈️🛫