Hello folks. Here's our blog. It was going to be a diary, minutely recording our doings, but that would have bored the tits off all of you. So, here are some lumps from our adventure. So far the defining moments our time in Vancouver have been the moments when we’ve ascended, rapidly.

Split Level City

Everyone says they want to live by the sea. I’m sure there are pasty, undernourished Vancouverites who dream of moving to Vladivostock or Sheffield but that wet stuff is a killer. It’s even better when the bottom of those seas rise up to become the living quarters and continue upwards to thousands of rocky feet. Mountains and oceans are a damn plucky combination.

We got fortunate with the weather the first few days we were here. The first Friday lucked up a little golden, spring-y and a little fresh. You can’t see the mountains at all here when the weather is shit, but when it shines those buggers glow, snow and all.

Friday 20^th May: 1pm: We take the sea bus, the moderately sized ferry, mercifully song free, across to North Vancouver, nip round Lonsdale Quay and buy food. Across the bay Downtown Vancouver is all glassy and tall; impressive but brittle. 45 minutes later we are kneedeep in snow. I’m not sure how she does it, it may just be love, but a short bus ride at an interestingly vertical angle takes us to the cablecar base somewhere on Grouse Mountain.

“You’ll like it,” she says, in a dimply lady way, knowing full well a stand on a kitchen chair brings me out in pale terror.

This bloody woman is the A-Team to my B.A.Barracus. Held up on cables which look like the veins on thin men’s arms who’ve done a little weightlifting with just a touch of supplements, a sodding great glass shopping basket swings up to 3720 feet, out of the fake sultriness of the spring, over the thick green pines and into the Alps. This is just one of Emma’s many ideas. I’m not keen on heights but it was a good one.

There are moments in life of sheer, surprised joy and this was one of them, the pair of us gobstruck and enervated by the altitude, enjoying trudging through the unexpected winter we’d just found. Leaning over the balcony, immediately below us is the man-made and vast, but normalised by sheer height, Capilano Dam, beyond that, filling the eyes, is Vancouver stretched out like a dissected city, beyond that and to the West is Vancouver Island, to the left of that and stretching south is America. Who could get bored of this except for those who only know this?

Friday 27^th May: 11pm: A small bar in Gastown with the Canucks flicking and thumping their way round an ice rink. It’s busy and we can’t see the big screen and struggle to pick up the little points of interest on the tiny screen above the bar. We fancy food, and some kind of antidote to the heavy, chippy, meaty Canadian food we’ve been filling up on since we arrived. Outside, and Em spies the rich pinky glow to the west, a sunset, a right proper sunset. A drift down to Canada Place but the big buildings just get in the way. Taxi!

English Bay is like a broad polite introduction to Stanley Park on the map and is somehow English, but a Riviera English, wide and safe with the sun sinking slowly, not like the Cape South African version which legs it into the sea without so much as a goodbye. An arm-in-arm promenade is not so much in order but called for. Good eats in a Greek restaurant and warm with wine Robson Street is headed up. Robson is like the central strip on the sea-surrounded lump that is Downtown. Around half way up that street Em points directly up. Bim! 42 floors in twenty seconds and we enter the revolving Cloud 9 restaurant at the top of the Empire Landmark hotel. If it was at ground level it would be a cheesy overpriced bar but at [at least] a million feet directly above our peers it is a noble, slowly turning moment of regality for the Kings and Queens that we truly are. Whiskeys and White Russians as we spin so sedately we’re unsure which way we’re moving but at least we know we are in Bladerunner.

It’s that thing with cities; they’re so crammed with everything bad and good in turn but stick on a few high altitude fairy lights and stand above it all and you want to weep with joy.

Next!