We were due to meet for 10:30am and I could tell Leo was having one of those mornings where it's difficult to get him motivated, but I managed, just, to get him in the car with enough time to get there.
They had a quick play in the little park before the lovely walk through the woods, following the river and out across fields to a larger park. I didn't feel comfortable going into the actual park as it was just heaving with people so I told my 2 they couldn't go in, but actually no one wanted to go in anyway so that worked out well.👍
We tried to avoid the ice-cream van but Kelly was adamant they were having one so she forked out for them all. Leo doesn't eat ice-cream so he had his crisps instead.🍦
We did some more walking and the boys decided they wanted to go in the water. Kelly was not happy about her 2 going in but seeing as she got my boys ice-cream without permission, I thought it was only fair to return the favour and promptly encouraged her boys to go wild, and they did. 💦😂 They were so happy though, I didn't feel bad for too long. 😄
On the way back to the car Oscar decided it was a good idea to slip over and land in a huge pile of dog poo! It was all down his arm, on both hands and all over his hoodie. 🤮🤮 Luckily Kelly had wet wipes and a doggy poo bag so I cleaned him up as best as I could and he rinsed himself off in the river a bit too. When we got home he was straight in the shower for a scrub.
I arrived home to a garden full of boys! Ellis had brought all his mates round and they were on the trampoline, playing table tennis and sitting around drinking Fanta. It was all very civilised and lots of laughter going on so it was nice. Inside was Leo, Oscar and Louie having some gaming time as there were some horrible boys down the scooter park at the moment.
Spoke to Mum for a bit and did everyone some dinner before blogging. Plan is to watch an After Life season 2 episode with Rob if we can both be free at the same time for 20 minutes!
Where they to? - 28th July Vancouver
Today has been a good day. Everything we've been told or read about trips like ours says that when you visit popular tourist attractions you should aim to get there before even the milkmen are thinking about crawling from their pits. So that's what we did. Grouse Mountain is a peak over 4000ft high, the bottom of which is a 20 minute ferry & bus ride from Downtown Vancouver. There is a cable car that takes you to the top and we bought our tickets for it yesterday from the Tourist Info desk who, rather deviously, didn't inform us that there is a well beaten path you can climb to the top to save yourself the expense. As it happens, with all the walking we've done lately, it was probably no bad thing anyway. Making an early start certainly has it's merits as we virtually had the mountain top to ourselves for nearly 2 hours. However, being up at that time does expose you to some rather odd people. We were befriended by a mad, German sounding French-Canadian woman on the bus because I helped her on with her bike. She proceeded to make bizarre whooping noises and mid-air peddling gestures at me for the duration of the bus journey.
On the way up the mountain, we had to ourselves a cable car which we would later share with about 30 people on the way down. The views on the way up were every bit as spectacular as we'd imagined they would be with Vancouver sprawling out in-front of us, flanked by towering peaks and meandering waterways. Atop the mountain, there is a rehabilitation centre for endangered species. Due to the lack of crowds to make them nervous and the fact that we were there during feeding time, I found myself face-to-face with a fully grown Grizzly Bear who, when he was a nipper, was orphaned when his mum was run over. The look in his eyes made me think that he was unsure whether the fully grown, alpha male of the Red-Cheeked Ginger Somerset Bear that he was confronted with was friend or foe. As it happened, I was scared shitless of him so he needn't have worried himself.
We moved on to look at some wolves and, later in the day, a falconry display. The falconry display was going well until the penny dropped with a hawk who, in a Eureka moment rivalled only by Archimedes, realised that there was sod-all stopping him from buggering off over the top of another mountain and munching on some sparrows, or whatever it is that hawks do when they want to kill some time. We also saw an owl and a peregrine falcon, which, they said, with a top speed of over 200MPH, is the fastest known animal. Now, call me pernickety if you like, but didn't the Russkies send a dog into space once?
We also watched a Lumberjack show which, despite sounding corny, was quite good fun and was a great display of athleticism and expertise. We took a ski-lift half-way down the mountain so that we could take the same lift back up again. Presumably, they haven't yet come up with a more constructive use for ski-lifts in the summer months. We went for a guided hike which had a bit about the aborignal history of the area, did a few other odds and ends, and then, boarded the cable car for the descent down the mountain which was so fast that it felt like the aforementioned peregrine would've struggled to keep up with us. It was futile trying to pop your ears as, no sooner had you done it, than they needed popping again.
We then moved on to the second part of our itinerary for the day, a trip to Lynn Canyon. To be honest, the toils of the last few days coupled with the early start meant that we were both fly-catching and were quite ready to simply sleep on the bus and go back to our room but we agreed that it would be silly to miss out since we were so far from home and we'd been advised by a friend back home, Nancy, that the Suspension Bridge across the canyon was something not to miss out on. When you read the words Suspension Bridge, don't think Clifton. Think 2 ropes, some rickety planks, a stinking great drop into a ravine and swaying like the bridges used to do in those old black and white movies. This is where the day started to go wrong. I guess we should've seen it coming after our navigational feats on the bikes a few days ago. After you cross the bridge, there's a sign saying:
"Twin Falls - 20 mins"
We strongly considered giving it a miss but it sounded so pretty and, again, the thought that we're so far from home drove us forward. We made it down the canyon to the Twin Falls at the bottom and paused for a while next to the river to take some photos and soak up the surroundings. As we were climbing the banks of the river back to the track, a chirpy fella in his late 50s, very reminiscent of Mr Miyagi, and who we later found out originated from Hong Kong, appeared at the top of the bank asking us for directions. Rather, I should say, asking Mush for directions. I just watched on bemused as they managed to convince one-another that the way he'd come from, and not the way we'd come from, was the way back to where we'd started. Now, I don't know about you, but in the dimension that I live, if you keep going in the same direction, it takes many thousands of miles, several sea-crossings and a couple of continents before you end up back where you started. Not in the dimension that Mush and Miyagi co-exist, it doesn't. 2 and a half hours into our 20 minute hike, we happened upon something that had been conspicuous by it's absence for the last 2 hours and 10 minutes - another human being. This human being advised us that we were "a long hike through some fairly rugged wilderness from Lynn Canyon Suspension Bridge" and, hence, our bus stop. No shit, Sherlock. How Mush and Miyagi had the cheek to look surprised is beyond me. So, we're in the Canadian Wilderness, in the bottom of a canyon, in Brown Bear territory, with a man who practices all day at catching flies with chopsticks and a new stranger who has slightly too few clothes on for my liking. You might think this was time to begin panicking but it turns out that we'd walked so chuffing far down this canyon that we were actually only about 200 yards from civilisation. We dragged our weary bodies down to the road and found a bus to collapse on which, fortunately, was heading in our direction. As it's become something of a daily ritual of martyrdom to calculate how many miles we've walked, today's total is 7, half of which were climbing over felled trees and clambering up or down dusty slopes.
We're going to sleep well tonight.
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It's 8pm and I'm finished for the night. Going to clear up the kitchen and get my new sloggies on. Grey with white stars and they're so snuggly. If I want to do a longer run tomorrow I'll need to get up super early as meeting Saskia tomorrow and I'll need to do packed lunches and get everyone dressed and out by a similar time to today. 🤔 Looking forward to getting the boys out again and doing something a bit different but normal different if that makes sense. 😐
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