Tuesday, August 2, 2016

It’s been several months since we’ve done any traveling, and I’ve been experiencing withdrawal pains.

Fortunately, we left this morning to get a fix, heading from Minneapolis to Vancouver, British Columbia. We’ll be visiting here for a few days before boarding a cruise ship to Alaska on Saturday.

When we checked weather.com, it said the temp would be in the low 70’s, not bad for Minnesotans. When we arrived, the web page said 61 degrees, but it was clearly quite a bit colder – verified when we heard the temp on the radio as 12 degrees Celsius, or about 53 degrees Fahrenheit, and rainy. We are Minnesotans, though, so we added some layers and braved the cold.

Our hotel is situated near the harbor (I just tried spelling this the British way – harbour – and autocorrect kicked in), and across the street from the White Caps FB Stadium. For those of you from the US, that’s soccer. The British Columbia Lions also play here – Canadian Football. The stadium has a retractable roof which allows blue sky over the entire field below; the all weather turf has a FIFA 2-star rating (son Sean will know what that means,) and there are other cool features that matter to soccer/CFL fans.

I was most impressed by the sculptures out front, four bronze statues of Terry Fox, a British Columbia native. He had lost a leg to osteosarcoma at the age of 19, and set out three years later from St. John’s Newfoundland, to raise money for cancer research, but his cancer recurred before he could complete the run, and he was forced to stop in Thunder Bay, Ontario, just 350 miles north of our home. Fox died the following year, a month shy of his 23rd birthday. The Terry Fox Foundation has raised over $500 million since then for cancer research, quite a legacy for that young man.

We had dinner tonight at a lovely Italian restaurant – Lupo Restaurant & Vinoteca, located just a couple of blocks from our hotel. We had a wonderful meal: sablefish for me and steak and fungi with chianti risotto for Mark, accompanied by a brunello wine and finished with blood orange and hazelnut gelatos. Yummy!