One of the things I wanted to do in Vancouver was take the ferry over to Vancouver Island and drive around there to see the sights. But, the cost of going over on the ferry for a vehicle and 2 people was over $50 – one way! Yipes! That was too much money, I felt.

So, instead of that, we took a sightseeing cruise around the Vancouver harbor. It was real interesting, and we learned quite a biabout Vancouver and Canada. The harbor is really large and is home to a very large drydock for repairing ships. There are several Canadian Navy ships docked there, there is a container ship area where huge container ships from the Asian ports get loaded and unloaded, and there is a seaplane dock as well as lots and lots of private ships, boats and a rowing club.

Vancouver also has a very large park in the midst of downtown and right along the harbor that is larger than Central Park in New York. The tour guide had a fun story about the Vancouver park – it had no squirrels, and when New York heard about that they shipped 2 pairs of gray squirrels to the city of Vancouver so their park could have squirrels. Well, now there are apparently way too many since there are no predators, and the tour guide said if you visit the park you’ll see that all the squirrels still have their New York accent. He also said if you visit the park and a squirrel throws an acorn at you, thank the city of New York. LOL

Back during the depression the Canadian government had lots of projects to keep men employed, just like the U.S. did. One project was to build a seawell along the downtown park where it was on the coast, to keep erosion down and provide a safe place for people to walk, jog or bike around the perimeter of the park. Also during that time, a wealthy family, the Guinness family of the beer fame, privately funded building a bridge from the downtown park across the mouth of the harbor to the north Vancover area. For several years there was a quarter toll to cross the bridge until the family was repaid, and since then it’s been free to cross and maintained by the government. It is a problem now though, since several large cruise ships use Vancouver as a base of operation and the largest ships cannot get under the bridge. So, the city is debating whether they need to replace the bridge in order to get the largest cruise ships into the harbor.

This busy harbor is home to lots of harbor seals and we saw several. We also saw several jellyfish swimming around in the harbor.

The day was beautiful and warm for our harbor cruise and we had a great time. Here are some pictures: