A beautiful city

Having a great time still. Cathy and John are really friendly and wonderful hosts. We've not been down town (city centre) yet but what we've seen so far shows Vancouver to be a beautiful city - and that's even with the surrounding mountains and most of the ocean shrouded in mist and cloud!

Me and my latest cousin, Cathy. She's actually taller than me. And she isn't as young as she looks!

Food's good, too: I'm eating Indian candy as I write - fresh salmon smoked over alder and rubbed with berries and/or maple. Yummy, especially with cream cheese.

Cathy and John's house is on a hill overlooking Port Coquitlam - not be confused with the nearby town of Coquitlam.

View from the balcony. Their drive is much steeper than it looks here

Today we went to a salmon hatchery.

A heron hangs about downstream from the hatchery

And a few very tired salmon rest before making the final part of  their  trip upstream to spawn and die

Then we walked around the woods - I had no idea that the climate here was temperate rain forest.

The many mosses, the fungi, the large-leaved ferns and the huge trees came as a bit of a surprise.

John, Cathy, Jill and Roger - at last Roger's glad he brought his coat all the way from England

Rain forest

Big, big trees - cedars and Douglas firs

Unusual fungi - well, I've never seen the like before

We walked a bit at English Bay and round Stanley Park and had a good lunch at a restaurant overlooking the Pacific - delicious eggs Benedict (Roger had his with 'shrimp').

How did they do that?

Cathy's feet, John's feet - and a seal!

An interesting installation of laughing bronze figures by a Chinese artist 

Logs on the beach instead of deck chairs

Shipyards and big ships, including a visiting cruise liner, in the distance across the bay

Dramatic skies and low cloud, but you can just make out the high rise buildings on the far shore