Canada — Vancouver

Vancouver is a big urban area, a city surrounded by suburbs, with more people than any place we've been since we left the Twin Cities two months ago. It's in a beautiful setting, with mountains all around and the ocean lapping at its feet. (Well, not the ocean itself, but a sound the connects to the ocean, the same way Puget Sound connects Seattle to the ocean.)

Coming after all our travels across the prairies and the mountains, it was a bit of a shock and a pain, having to deal with freeways and lots of other drivers on the road. Plus not being able to find places, even with the help of my GPS. I had figured that the GPS, hooked up to my laptop PC, would make it easy to navigate around cities, but no. When I typed in the name of an RV park, it never heard of it. So I typed in the exact address, and it still couldn't find it. (Thanks, Garmin!) So we had to navigate the old fashioned way, looking at a map.

I took the light rail downtown and walked around, looking at the buildings and people. Gas Town, China Town, small neighborhoods but interesting. As I walked past the public library I noticed employees on strike, so I chatted with one for a few minutes. They'd been on strike for five weeks, their main issue being wage equity between men and women workers. (Amazing, isn't it, that it's still being fought, thirty years after we had our consciousness raised about equal pay for equal work?)

I rode the passenger ferry across to North Vancouver, just for the fun of it, and noticed the ferry was clean, well designed for fast boarding and disembarking of passengers, and well run. Their first light rail system was constructed decades ago, and they liked it so much they built a second. Trains run every few minutes and carry lots of passengers. The trains are automatic — there's no human driving involved — and they were built elevated (in the suburbs) and underground (downtown) so a train never crosses a road, completely eliminating any chance of a train colliding with a car. (If only Minneapolis had done that along Hiawatha...)

I also went to the fair, which happened to be running in Vancouver, but it turned out to be nothing like the magnificent Minnesota State Fair — it was more the size of the county fair in Owatonna. To my delight, they had the same kind of hucksters selling slicers and dicers, pots and pans, and miracle mops. They also had corn dogs and mini donuts, but no milk booth and no chocolate chip cookies. (Later I went into a shopping mall looking for the Canadian equivalent of Mrs. Field's cookies, but they didn't have any. Canadians don't know what they're missing!)

Vancouver is what you would get if you moved Minneapolis to the west coast, and you would gain beautiful mountains, cooler summers, warmer winters, and an ocean. And you'd lose the mosquitoes. There's a lot to like about that.


Squamish

Soon tired of the big city, we headed up the coast to Squamish (and no, that isn't a misspelling of "squeamish" as my spell-check thinks). It's a small town with a curious past: It was founded over a hundred years ago during the mining and lumbering booms, but its only access to Vancouver was by water. It was only fifty years later that a road was built and Squamish had better access to Vancouver.

We enjoyed the small-town atmosphere and Saturday farmer's market, which included arts and crafts and massage as well as fruit and vegetables. But now Squamish has two colleges, and in 2010, Winter Olympic events will be held just up the road at the Whistler ski resort. Property values have already risen dramatically, and development has been in strip malls and subdivisions up and down the highway. Can Squamish retain its small-town charm? I sure hope so.

Between Squamish and Vancouver there's a mining museum. We stopped and I toured the copper mine — the tour actually takes you inside the mine and they demonstrate how mining trechniques changed through the years, from hammers pounding drills to compressed air machines. (Recommended.)

The drive between Vancouver and Squamish is incredibly scenic. The road rises as it hugs the mountainside, and you get views out over the sound to steep mountains, some with snow on their peaks, rising majestically from the water. To my eye, it's right up there with the sights of Jasper and Banff parks.