Running out of things to do in the Okanagan, we decided to head to Vancouver for some big city excitement. With a surfeit of unused air miles we booked plane tickets rather than risk winter mountain roads. With a little internet research I had discovered that Vancouver had a lot going on during our stay. Celebration of La Poutine, a Hot Chocolate Festival, the Davinci Experience, the relighting of the 2010 Olympic Torch for the 2022 Olympics, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, a free admission cable suspension bridge in Lynn Valley Park and most importantly connecting with friends and family that we have not seen in almost two years. Our bubble is about to expand.
Photo: Infotel Penticton
These clouds can remain trapped for weeks but sometimes it can be escaped by driving into the mountains and getting above the cloud layer. On occasion the moister warmer air rising from the lakes mixes with the trapped colder air to create snow. Known as “lake snow” in other parts of the world here we call it “flavage” a termed coined by one of our local weatherpersons.
Over the years, we have been often stymied completing the last leg of our flights into Penticton due to low cloud cover and or snow cancelling the flight. This has required us to spend a night in Vancouver and more often having to fly into Kelowna the next day with the additional hassle of getting to Penticton from there.
Photo: Penticton Western News
It has happened so often, that we have given up flying into and out of Penticton during the winter, instead opting for Kelowna’s airport and its extravagant parking fees or driving to Vancouver on treacherous winter roads. So before choosing travel dates for our Vancouver adventure, I checked the 14 day weather forecast for Penticton and Vancouver selecting our travel dates based on favourable weather forecasts. Sadly 14 day forecasts are really no more then 14 day lucky guesses. Fortuitously, our plane had already landed before the Valley became completely socked in and the snow had started. Taking off is not as difficult as landing in a blizzard but just as scary.
Next stop was the Diva, a bar in the trendy Met Hotel for a feed of Shoyu glazed crispy pork poutine, a tribute to La Poutine Week. But it seems Valentine’s Day had them re-shaping their food menu around a “love” theme and the poutine had been dropped off the menu. Crazy right, I mean, who doesn’t love poutine.
Our final stop of the day was to see the Vancouver Olympic torch once again lighting up the sky like it did in 2010.
Sadly, not happening, did someone not pay the gas bill?
I discovered later that it had been lit but only for the first day of the opening ceremony. What the f###, our adventure seems to be going quickly off the rails.
At this juncture, I would like to give a shout out to TransLink, the public company that provides public transportation to most of the Lower Mainland. The have developed a mass transit system that can rival any we have used around the world. Utilizing their very useful app to plan our trips, we were whisked around quickly and surprisingly on time. The app would meticulously plan your travel and provide an estimate of the time of your arrival. They were never out by more than a couple of minutes on these times.
Photo: See Sight Tours
To access trails you needed to cross on the famous Capilano suspension bridge. Arriving, we discovered that there was an admission charge to use the bridge. I was ready to pay but Nonie said we could not afford it and nixed the hike. This ignited the first real fight we had as a married couple. We were mortgaged to the max so money was very, very, very tight. Thus was borne my mantra, “happy wife, happy life”. There was to be no bridge crossing that day.
First she starts humming her happy song, looking straight ahead, never down and the most import, never stopping to enjoy the view till she reached the other side.
The Lynn Canyon suspension bridge has become just another notch on her bridge belt. She even stopped for a photo op but never look down.
The bridge crosses over Lynn Creek which for the past several thousand years has carved out the beautiful Lynn Canyon and filled it with picturesque waterfalls
and deep crystal clear pools.
Sadly it has also killed and injured dozens of people who fooled themselves into believing they could safely climb down the steep cliffs and swim or dive into these inviting pools.
The trails are well maintained and marked, perfectly suited for a couple of seniors. The trails do climb up and down into the canyon numerous times but instead of intrusive switch back trails, they have installed stairs where any change in elevation was required. This was done to reduce the impact on the environment as stairs require much less area to build on compared to switchback routes.
While it reduced the environmental impact, not so much for the impact on our legs. "Feeling the burn" became an ongoing sick joke when we kept stumbling up and down all those damn stairs.
Lunch over we jumped back on a bus back to civilization with a stop at Drewssew before heading back to the hotel for a few laps in the pool and some hot tub time. No sign of that 30% chance of rain.
Nonie and I have had the pleasure of visiting the Sistine Chapel twice. The first time was in 1993 when we were on a family vacation. At the time the Chapel was undergoing restoration and 2/3 of the ceiling was blocked with scaffolding and dust sheets so only a small section of the ceiling was visible. This visit required two trips to the Vatican as on our first trip we were wearing shorts which are not allowed if you want access to the Chapel. It is still verboten to this day, no bare knees or arms allowed. Twenty years later, the scaffolding and sheets were gone we were dressed appropriately and left awed by the entire ceiling.
Photographs are not allowed but I could not resist and took this in 2014 when God wasn't looking. Does not do the ceiling justice.
Viewing the ceiling can be daunting, at over 40 meters high with lighting kept low to protect the images. It can be a workout on your neck keeping it in a tilted position that allows you to look up that high. Today’s exhibition made viewing the splendor of the ceiling so much easier and no dress code. Every painting was broken out separately and reproduced on panels from 8’x4’up to 8’x20’ and hung of walls. They are high definition digital reproductions with lots of lighting.
When the name Michelangelo pops up in my day, my mind immediately goes to one picture that I first saw on the ceiling in 1993. Till this day, I did not know the name of the painting but it had been burned into my memory. The painting is of a beautiful woman “of course a beautiful woman” known as the Delphic Sibyl. She was a prophet in the 3rd Century who chanted proclamations about future events from the Sibyl rock, a natural rock rostrum found near the Temple of Apollo in Delphi Greece. There are several paintings of other Sibyl prophets to be found on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
There was not a lot of information provided on the paintings in the Sistine Chapel so I assumed everything I saw had something to do with Jesus. After all, we were in the Vatican, the heart of Catholic religion. Not so. None of the art on the ceiling has any direct relationship to Jesus. Shocking revelation, I know but it had to be told. Over the centuries there has been much discussion of the paintings by historians looking for proof that paintings could be linked to the story of Jesus. But it is all supposition and not built on proven facts.
Back to the hotel before jumping on the Skytrain out to Surrey and dinner with an old high school friend. We finished day 3 with lots of laughs and good memories and a small surprise at the train station in Surrey. It seems that the frequency of trains into downtown Vancouver have been reduced after 9pm due to COVID, so we had a 20 minute wait for the next one. Using the app we were given an alternate route that involved a different Skytrain stop, the #99 Broadway bus and the Canada Line train which got us to the Yaletown stop only 8 minutes earlier than the later direct train would have.
So the plan today was a run out to the Tsawwassen Mill Outlet Mall in Delta and the indoor Davinci Experience so showers were not going to get in the way of our enjoyment.
We joined Jesus for supper. Probably our last one.
Davinci was a brilliant painter, anatomist, engineer, inventor, arms dealer and creator of weapons of mass destruction. It would seem a misnomer to call Davinci an arms dealer when you are staring mesmerized at his famous image of the Vitruvian Man which he believed to be a divine connection between the human form and the universe. How could an artist who could create something so perfect design weapons that could kill so many people.
From the first machine gun to the.......
........first armoured tank, he had designs for all kinds of 15th Century mass killing machines. To be fair, it has not been established which of his designs if any actually made it on to the battle field. But it is the thought that counts; isn’t it?
Thankfully my disappointment of Mr. Davinci was tempered by my enjoyment of an up close visit with the Mona Lisa. It is thought that Mona is a portrait of the wife of a Florentine merchant who had commissioned Leo to create it. For some reason, Leo had difficulty in giving up the portrait, never delivered it and carried it around with him for most of his life. Having seen the original in the Louvre and now this high definition reproduction, I can see why he could have been crushing on Mona. Culturally sated we headed back into Vancouver for a late dinner with family that was filled with good beer and lots more laughs.
Editor’s Note- Due to Nonie’s Italian heritage, she has inserted herself into my blog. It seems Davinci should actually be written da Vinci but I am too lazy to go back in re-edit that section.
