I went to Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in June of 2023. This is my story.
Alright, so this trip to Canada was the second part of a two city trip. The first part was Seattle, and then I drove up to Vancouver and spent a few days there. I had my pup (Kylo) with me, and we stayed in a house boat in a marina in North Vancouver.
I’ll start with a few fun facts.
1) In Canada, some green lights flash. This means that there might be a person waiting to cross, so you should watch out for any body that might be dumb enough to walk into traffic. In the city, most of the green lights flash and it can be super distracting if you aren’t used to it and you don’t know why it’s happening. Also, according to google, in Ontario, it means something else.
2) I highly recommend staying in North Vancouver for a few reasons, but one of them is you get to take the SeaBus! I mean, you can take it if you don’t want to deal with driving and parking, or you don’t have a car. The SeaBus is like 4 bucks round trip to get over to Vancouver proper. It’s really chill and a pleasant 7 minute ride across the bay. North Vancouver is also a lot less crowded than Vancouver, but it still has plenty of coffee places and other stores.
3) Vancouver has a pretty good public transportation system with busses, trains, and the aforementioned SeaBus. All of the public transportation is Tap-To-Pay with your credit card, or you can find an easily locatable kiosk to purchase a temporary paper card to use.
4) To bring a dog into Canada, you will need their rabies vaccination record, and your food must be in the original packaging. Here’s the link to the Canadian website: https://inspection.canada.ca/importing-food-plants-or-animals/pets/eng/1326600389775/1326600500578
Now onto my trip.
Day 1 was a lovely, if not sunny, drive up from Seattle and across the border into Canada. The drive is only about 3 hours, and it literally took 5 minutes of answering monotone questions by the border control agent to get into Canada. The way back was a very different story, but I’ll get to that later. This was my first time driving in a country that does not use MPH, so I had a fun time digging through my cars settings to figure out how to change that. Google recommended the song “The Tragically Hip” by The Wheat Kings to listen to as we crossed into Canada. Also, this border guard did not care AT ALL about my pup or her food. We made a brief stop at Tim Horton’s to get some Tam-tams and a coffee, then we continued on up to North Vancouver to check into the AirBnB.
I found a cute little house boat hosted by a man named Borys. Borys met us outside the marina and gave a splendid tour of his houseboat. The house boat was definitely a fun experience, but at the end of the day it wasn’t too different inside from any other place to sleep. It was about a 5 minute walk down the dock and up the ramp to the sidewalk, and this was slightly annoying for my pup in the morning. The marina was also a nice 7ish minute walk down the seawall to the SeaBus terminal, so it was a great location for that.
It finally stopped raining, so we hopped on the SeaBus, then took the train down to Richmond for the Richmond Night Market! It is open for most of the year starting in late April and going until late October. This market features foods from around the world as well as fun carnival games and other nicely priced items. They also had a cool neon sign wall. See the following link for their official website: http://www.richmondnightmarket.com/
The photo is from their website.
I had a great time, I even won a panda bear from a carnival game that required you to roll a bowling ball over a hill at just the right speed over the hill so that it doesn’t hit the backstop and roll back. I also pitifully lost a really fun game that involved little pvc pipes randomly falling from the frame around you. You had to catch 6/12 to win a small prize. I caught only caught one, but I’m very excited about the one I caught! I also ate some good food that I didn’t get a photo of, and I had some “butter beer”. I actually don’t recommend butter beer outside of Harry Potter world.
The only trouble with taking public transportation is that you are beholden to the city’s schedule. The night market goes until midnight, but we had to leave around 10 to make it back to North Vancouver. It wasn’t a problem thought because it had already been a long day.
Day 2 was pretty much: Rain. My human travel companion planned this day, but the weather was not good for it. We took a 2 hour ferry (Horseshoe Bay to Nanaimo) over to Vancouver Island, known for its dog friendliness and beautiful outdoorsy scenery, but it rained the whole time. It turns out that all the top “dog friendly” places in Nanaimo are outdoor patio type places that close when it rains. We were supposed to be there for 8 hours, but we promptly changed our return tickets so we only had to kill 3 hours total. OH! Also, there’s only one person who drives for Uber/Lyft that allows dogs in his car. We Uber’ed over to a little shop that let us stand outside under an umbrella and then we Uber’ed back. Thankfully I was very engrossed in a book at the time, so I got 4 undisturbed free hours to read.
Ironically it stopped raining shortly after we arrived back to the houseboat. After getting cleaned up we headed into town to get dinner at Gastown Gastronomy. The food was crazy good. I had an appetizer that was seasonal pickles. Think cucumbers, cauliflower, carrots, bell peppers, stuff like that. It was so good, and I’d recommend that for pickle lovers. For my entre, I had Albacore Tuna Crudo that was amazing. It was a little small, but that’s to be expected from a fancy place. For dessert, I had “Elvis”. If you’ve got your Elvis trivia down, then you could probably guess it had something to do with peanut butter and banana. It was Banana Panna Cotta with some peanut butter around, and some freeze dried banana and peanut brittle. It really sent my taste buds to new places. My travel companion got “Milk and Cookies” that turned out to be really really fancy milk and cookies. I tried a bit of it, and it was tasty. A bit nostalgic, but somehow elevated to an adult palate. The milk was not just milk, and the cookie was really expertly made. Now that I think about it, it was kinda like in “The Menu” movie where the woman asks the chef to make her a cheeseburger and he really makes a cheeseburger. Only difference here was it was already on the menu and nobody died after. Overall, the ambiance was lovely. Checkout the photo I took below.
It was a lovely night, and we could see the city across the bay. Check out the photo I took from North Vancouver near the SeaBus terminal.
Day 3 was much more active than the previous days. We got to the Capilano Suspension Bridge park bright and early and really did miss a lot of the crowds. The park is located in North Vancouver, so there’s another reason to stay in North Vancouver. This place is dog friendly, and everyone seemed to love how brave my pup was going along all the bridges. They have a nicely done educational exhibit at the beginning of the park, and they have a lot of tours and other educational demonstrations throughout the park. They maintain several totem poles from the local tribes. See the photo of Kylo next to a dog totem pole.
After cleaning up after the park, we went back over to Vancouver proper, and explored Chinatown and Gastown. It could have been because it was Sunday, but Chinatown wasn’t really much of anything in comparison to San Francisco’s or New York’s, or even Houston’s Vietnamese Town. Gastown, on the other hand, I do recommend checking out. It has lots of niche stores and hip food/drink places. Below is another photo of Vancouver from North Vancouver, but in the day this time.
Day 4 was the drive back to the US of A. Of course I put on “Party in the U.S.A” by Miley Cyrus as we cross the border. It did take 45 minutes of sitting in the car to get to the front of the line to talk to the border agent. He was very concerned with the safety of the United States, but he did not know what the giant structure across the road from his desk was. We had been looking at this thing slowly growing in the distance and trying to figure out what it was. Service was horrendous in this location, probably due to all the bored people, so we could not just google it. Imagine my disappointment when I finally found someone who sees this thing every day and his response was “I don’t know.” Much later when I got home I googled it. It’s an art installation called a “non-sign.”
Well, that’s my story. I hope you found a few things you’d like to try out, or at least enjoyed reading about my first trip to Canada. I do plan to go to Calgary and Toronto at some point in the future.
Vancouver was the second part of a two city trip, so if you want to read about the next part then follow the link here.
Adventures with Abigail 