Vancooooover
July 5-8 my mom and I flew to Vancouver, BC, just to have a look around. Me mum had some time off from her volunteer gig, and I had some vacation time coming to me (this was when I planned the trip; then I got fired). She wanted to go somewhere she hadn't been before, somewhere not so hot, so the Pacific Northwest it was. We booked a flight and hotel through travelocity.com and got a much better price than what a travel agency offered.
It was a perfect trip, almost no problems or hitches. No big flight delays, no lost reservations, no forgetting the passport, and get this-no rain!
That's right: four sunny days in a row in Vancouver. Don't know how we did it. But I think I might have preferred the rain to some extent because the mid-70s in humid weather can be pretty sticky and gross.
And because I'm a moron when it comes to camera settings. I didn't want to use the auto-exposure because it invokes the flash too often, so I blew open the aperture and hoped that the camera would compensate by giving me the right shutter speed. I was using 400-800 speed film, so I figured I'd get good exposure in the shade. And sure enough, the photos I took in deep shade turned out pretty good. But the ones in the sun are overexposed. It didn't occur to me to close down the aperture a bit in full sun. Like I said, a moron.
But other than that, we did OK. We rented a car and tried to find our hotel from the directions and bad map the Hertz chick gave us. We ended up getting to know a good swath of Richmond, which is south of Vancouver. A phone call to the hotel got us to the right place, the Accent Hotel, which has an IHOP attached to it. Glory glory glory. Four days in a row of pancakes, bacon, eggs, and sausages.
We tried to find a "traditional Chinese garden" in Chinatown but were unsuccessful, so we went to Stanley Park. Wow! Talk about a great park. It's a peninsula on the northwest side of Vancouver that was reserved back in the 1800s, so it's mostly unspoiled. There's a one-way road around the perimeter with several places to park (you have to buy a parking ticket in a vending machine by the hour or the day), and paths criss-cross the park's interior, leading to two ponds and who knows what else.
It's filled with your typical rainforest fare: ferns, pines and other trees, ferns ferns ferns ferns ferns ferns, wildflowers, ferns, mossy stumps, ferns, bitty birds, ferns, and ferns. And then the edges of the park have views of the harbors and the strait betwixt Vancouver and Vancouver Island. It's weird to look out over the ocean and see mountains in the distance.
I had been hoping to see lots of birds, but most of the birds were high up in the forest canopy, so I couldn't see them at all. I did see "ravens," which are really Northwestern Crows (Corvus caurinus), fercryinoutloud. They are much smaller than the ravens I've seen in Southern Utah, which are larger than some hawks (27"). I saw two other songbirds that I haven't yet identified plus some mallards, a cormorant, various gulls (who wouldn't sit still long enough for me to identify them) and some bald eagles.
I also got some shots of wildflowers, almost none of which are in my Audubon wildflower book. Check them out:
foxglove
Wild Digitalis (Foxglove)
unknown wildflower
thimbleberry
A relative of raspberries, but scaled up several times larger, from the canes to the blooms to the thorns.
pink flower
another unknown
convolvulus
A type of bindweed, but scaled up several times larger than the stuff we have here.
ships
view from Stanley Park
That's enough for now: I'll post more later
It was a perfect trip, almost no problems or hitches. No big flight delays, no lost reservations, no forgetting the passport, and get this-no rain!
That's right: four sunny days in a row in Vancouver. Don't know how we did it. But I think I might have preferred the rain to some extent because the mid-70s in humid weather can be pretty sticky and gross.
And because I'm a moron when it comes to camera settings. I didn't want to use the auto-exposure because it invokes the flash too often, so I blew open the aperture and hoped that the camera would compensate by giving me the right shutter speed. I was using 400-800 speed film, so I figured I'd get good exposure in the shade. And sure enough, the photos I took in deep shade turned out pretty good. But the ones in the sun are overexposed. It didn't occur to me to close down the aperture a bit in full sun. Like I said, a moron.
But other than that, we did OK. We rented a car and tried to find our hotel from the directions and bad map the Hertz chick gave us. We ended up getting to know a good swath of Richmond, which is south of Vancouver. A phone call to the hotel got us to the right place, the Accent Hotel, which has an IHOP attached to it. Glory glory glory. Four days in a row of pancakes, bacon, eggs, and sausages.
We tried to find a "traditional Chinese garden" in Chinatown but were unsuccessful, so we went to Stanley Park. Wow! Talk about a great park. It's a peninsula on the northwest side of Vancouver that was reserved back in the 1800s, so it's mostly unspoiled. There's a one-way road around the perimeter with several places to park (you have to buy a parking ticket in a vending machine by the hour or the day), and paths criss-cross the park's interior, leading to two ponds and who knows what else.
It's filled with your typical rainforest fare: ferns, pines and other trees, ferns ferns ferns ferns ferns ferns, wildflowers, ferns, mossy stumps, ferns, bitty birds, ferns, and ferns. And then the edges of the park have views of the harbors and the strait betwixt Vancouver and Vancouver Island. It's weird to look out over the ocean and see mountains in the distance.
I had been hoping to see lots of birds, but most of the birds were high up in the forest canopy, so I couldn't see them at all. I did see "ravens," which are really Northwestern Crows (Corvus caurinus), fercryinoutloud. They are much smaller than the ravens I've seen in Southern Utah, which are larger than some hawks (27"). I saw two other songbirds that I haven't yet identified plus some mallards, a cormorant, various gulls (who wouldn't sit still long enough for me to identify them) and some bald eagles.
I also got some shots of wildflowers, almost none of which are in my Audubon wildflower book. Check them out:
foxglove
Wild Digitalis (Foxglove)
unknown wildflower
thimbleberry
A relative of raspberries, but scaled up several times larger, from the canes to the blooms to the thorns.
pink flower
another unknown
convolvulus
A type of bindweed, but scaled up several times larger than the stuff we have here.
ships
view from Stanley Park
That's enough for now: I'll post more later