Vancouver

Old and new favourites

/ Greg / Leave a comment

I have written more than a few times of my love for Vancouver. It really is one of my most favourite cities in the entire world and I’m very lucky to now have lived a quick direct flight away from it for the past decade. Arriving in Vancouver for a short vacation always feels a bit like coming back home even though I have never lived there. I have this selection of favourite places that I have accumulated over the years to go with the excitement of trying new things in a city that keeps evolving. Day one of any solo trip is now a well rehearsed practice – early morning flight, Skytrain from the airport to my hotel, drop my bags at a very early hour, find good coffee, then if the weather is great – Stanley Park for a hike around the seawall or if the weather is sketchy, head further afield for some craft beer tasting in Port Moody or Burnaby (or both!!!). With clouds threatening rain on my arrival in late August last year, I hopped on a train to Port Moody and enjoyed tastings at Twin Sails and Yellow Dog breweries followed by another tasting at Dageraad in Burnaby. My Vancouver vacation was off to a great start!

Beer tasting at Twin Sails in Port Moody, BC
Beer tasting at Yellow Dog in Port Moody, BC
Beer tasting at Dageraad in Burnaby, BC
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Wine group on the road

/ Greg / 1 Comment

Over the course of living in Saskatoon, we have become part of a great group of friends who take pleasure in wine tasting. That’s a fancy way of saying a group of us gets together a few times a year to enjoy wine, usually with food, sometimes on someone’s patio and sometimes in a favourite wine store in Saskatoon. We open a few bottles, then a few more, and the laughs begin to flow. Over the pandemic, we turned our group virtual for a spell and those zoom wine tasting nights felt like nights out and kept us going until things returned to normal. In those zoom wine tastings, we talked a lot about wine travel and as a group have now attended the international wine festival in Vancouver on two occasions including last year.

For this most recent wine trip, my wife and I headed to Vancouver a day before our group activities started for a bit of “us” time. On a cold, rainy night, we tucked into the cozy Chickadee Room cocktail bar for a couple of happy hour drinks and the free gluten free fried chicken that comes along with your order. This was a great first stop – excellent cocktails, tender juicy chicken all in a retro vibes bar that warmed us up.

Cocktails at the Chickadee Room in Vancouver
The Chickadee Room in Vancouver
Juke Fried Chicken at the Chickadee Room
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Murals of Mount Pleasant

/ Greg / Leave a comment

Among my favourite neighbourhoods in my favourite cities, Mount Pleasant in Vancouver stands out. On just about every trip, I will spend at least part of a day hanging out at one or more of the excellent craft breweries (Brassneck, 33 Acres, Faculty Brewing, Main Street Brewing, Electric Bicycle) and combining that with some exploring of the murals that decorate the buildings and alleyways up and down the hill.

On my most recent trip, armed with the excellent Vancouver Mural Fest map, I dug deeper into this neighbourhood’s art than I had previously and came away with some new favourite murals….

"Intersect" by Cara Guri; Mural in Mount Pleasant neighbourhood; Vancouver BC
“Intersect” by Cara Guri
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A neighbourhood approach

/ Greg / Leave a comment

Across a few trips to Vancouver last summer and fall I sampled the bounty that is that city’s craft beer scene. Vancouver is a favourite city of mine for a number of reasons – the direct flight from where I live, the ability to see mountains and water in the same place, the varied food scene, and definitely the abundance of craft beer.

Using a neighbourhood approach to exploration, I got one day kicked off in West Van at the earliest to open patio at Parallel 49. I created a tasting flight of a selection of hazy IPAs from that brewery and also from a couple of guest taps they had of Superflux. Luckily I was doing this neighbourhood tour by public transit and by foot, because these were all potent (and delicious!).

Parallel 49 Brewing Company
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The tradition continues, kind of…

/ Greg / Leave a comment

One of my favourite travel traditions is taking an annual self-indulgent, solo trip to satisfy my inner baseball nerd. Over the years, that now has me sitting at visiting 16 of the 30 major league ballparks with my brain constantly working on the logistics to tick off the final 14. The pandemic years put a halt to my progress that I’m glad is changing this year as I have plans to visit Detroit and Cleveland later this summer.

Last summer, looking to scratch the itch of live baseball, I decided to take the relatively short trip to Vancouver for a few nights of minor league baseball. The Vancouver Canadians, an affiliate of the Toronto Blue Jays, play out of the cozy and idyllic Nat Bailey Stadium. For the low cost of $25 you can have the best seat in the house behind home plate. A beautiful Vancouver summer evening, cold local craft beers and the crack of the bat….. couldn’t be better!

Vancouver Canadians game
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When a plan comes together

/ Greg / 1 Comment

Through the pandemic a group of our friends started a zoom-hosted wine club where one of us would pick two wines, a few recipes that would pair well, and then we’d get together to eat and drink and stare at the little electronic rectangles of our respective likenesses on our screens as we caught up and laughed. Laughed a lot. During a few of those get togethers, we chatted (as one is apt to do) about doing a real-life wine tasting trip when it was safe to do so again. Fast forward to this May when those wine-soaked plans turned real and landed us in Vancouver to attend the Vancouver International Wine Festival.

My wife and I built a fun and relaxed Vancouver itinerary around the large wine tasting we we all going to. For me, any trip to Vancouver needs to start with a hike around Stanley Park.

Stanley Park in Vancouver
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Vancouver for the holidays

/ Greg / Leave a comment

Almost eight months later, I have a vivid, yet simple memory. My wife and I were in the Calgary airport on Christmas night enroute to Vancouver for a short vacation. We were happy to be getting away to a favourite city for a few days and to be able to exchange our Saskatoon parkas for lighter rain jackets as we escaped from a prairie winter. My memory now of that night, through a prism of a pandemic that has grounded my traveling in 2020, is just of the simple, unadulterated happiness I get from traveling. As we sat waiting for our flight on to Vancouver, sharing a snack to tide us over before a very late night McDonalds run after we landed, I remember feeling at peace. And I wonder when I’ll be able to enjoy sitting in an airport again.

More than just sitting in an airport, I’m looking forward to eating and drinking in public establishments around the world again. On Boxing Day morning, as soon as it opened, I wandered into La Taqueria Pinche Taco Shop, one of a number of “must visit” places every time I’m in Vancouver.

La Taqueria Pinche Taco Shop

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A respectable crawl

/ Greg / Leave a comment

Here’s how my first hours of every trip to Vancouver go down. Drop my bags at the hotel. Go to my favourite taco place (La Taqueria Pinche… best tacos I’ve had outside of Mexico or San Diego). Make a beeline to one of the ever growing list of solid craft brewery taprooms. Enjoy that one, then head to the next taproom that is always less than three blocks away. Vancouver visits always get off on the right foot. In fact, this is a pattern that can repeat every day of a Vancouver trip. On my most recent trip to one of my favourite cities in the world, I designed a respectable four day craft beer crawl.

With a belly full of tacos I hopped a bus to East Van a couple hours after touching down in Vancouver and settled into the beautiful taproom at Andina Brewing Company. This is a really unique place with most of the beers made with obvious influences from South America. After being stuck in the depths of winter in Saskatoon, sitting in the sun coming through a window felt downright summery, even in February.

Andina Brewing Company

These beers were all thirst quenching, with the Lulo Sour my favourite. I also loved that cassava chips came with the tasting flight. Solid start to my Vancouver tastings in a beautiful setting.

Tasting room at Andina Brewing Company

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A day away from winter

/ Greg / Leave a comment

In February I traded in the bitterly cold temperatures of a Saskatoon winter for a colder than normal four days in Vancouver. Colder than normal still meant it was the first time in months that I could walk around outside without gloves on. It’s really all about small victories in surviving winter on the prairies. And while for most of the trip I had to carry around an umbrella to stay dry, I did get one nice day to leave the raincoat at the hotel and breathe in the fresh west coast air along the seawall.

I took a bus from downtown to Kitsilano Beach to start a hike along the seawall. My one nice day in Vancouver was actually a perfect February day in Vancouver. Seeing blue skies and water made my coastal, now landlocked heart, very happy.

Vancouver Seawall

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