Spent the last couple of days mooching around Vancouver itself, which was the reason for my manic dive through Canada last few days, although I could have quite happily spent the time in bed !
Woke up yesterday morning with agonising cramp in my right leg calf muscle, which I sort of dealt with – it only occurred to me later on in the day that it was caused by my foot being stuck to the accelerator pedal for the last seventy two hours !
Vancouver is an amazing city – really, really nice. There were two enormous cruise ships ready to leave the harbour yesterday when I got to Canada Place.
Whilst I’ve always had a bit of a thing about cruises, not wanting to do them, I was gobsamcked at the sheer size and beauty of the ships themselves – all going to Alaska !
I hadn’t realised the enormity of how much big business it was to do tours, both cruises and coaches to Alaska – it really is enormous.
Impossible really to describe Vancouver, so I’ll load some pics.
Suffice to say it is quite a typical North American city in many ways, but has an incredibly mellow feel to it.
This is partly, I think about the people themselves, but also that its on the Ocean which I think has a real effect on peoples spirit.
It also feels incredibly safe – not because there are barricades up , not because there are hundreds of policemen around, not because there is CCTV on every corner, feel a rant coming on, there aren’t any of these things.
There is a real genuine sense of trust between people as an underlying structure of their society – people basically seem to trust each other and whilst I am sure that trust is sometimes abused, as a starting point for their society it seems a very sound place and leads to a very genuine sense of stability.
