Vancouver: Trails and Parks

I’m in Vancouver, BC, the first stop on a cross-continent train-and-bike trip. To find out why I’m taking the long way to New York read my first post.

The first thing I did after arriving in Vancouver was take a four hour nap. I was beat. Then I woke up refreshed and jolly and ran out into the sunshine amid the throngs of happy Vancouverites (it was their first sunny day in weeks), hopped on my bike, and took to the trails that run along the water in downtown around False Creek to Stanley Park. (I also used trails far outside of downtown – even in the outskirts there are still great parks and trails, well signed and maintained.)

The downtown trails were generally split into a section for wheels (bicycles and rollerblades) and a section for feet (walkers and joggers), with a grade separation, different paving, or with signs or stencils indicating the two sides. (Or, as below, with all three.) In one place the trail was even split into three sections – for bikes, rollerblades and feet – as shown in this picture of my mom, below. Oh the opulence. Why have one trail when you can have three?

And the parks these trails wind through were so beautiful – meticulously landscaped, different sections having different characters and functions. I stopped in a park along a marina to marinate in my feelings of well-being and happiness for while. That’s where I discovered that while I’d been napping a naughty bird had shat inside my helmet where it hung on my bike. And I had applied that bird shit to my head. So everything wasn’t quite perfect in Vancouver. But the trails were pretty great.

Enough with the talking, here are some more photos:

—A trail around Stanley Park, the big greenspace attached to downtown, takes you out into the maritime traffic.

—Old railroad right-of-way turned into community gardens and trails, complete with chairs, compost bins, raised beds and really nice graffiti art. I saw a few of these. I couldn’t tell if they were official or anarchic.

—Goslings EVERYWHERE! On the trails! Totally blase about humans! Why aren’t our goslings like this? Maybe in their native territory Canadian geese are more courageous. Goslings would add tremendously to my daily commute in Portland.

—Bike paramedics – with heavily laden bikes, but no sirens that I could see – attend to a scraped knee.

—I think this is for drying off your kids when they turn blue after swimming in the cold water at this rocky beach on a cold day as kids are wont to do. It wasn’t working though, so maybe they only turn it on when it’s below 50 F outside. Ah, the Pacific Northwest. We really know how to have fun.