The Withrow’s go to Stanley Park

(Note: camera battery still dea, but it is charging! Will post more pictures tomorrow)

Today we decided to try to see some of Stanley Park, which is a HUGE City park located on Vancouver’s west side. At 1000 acres, it is the largest City Park in North America and, judging by all of the people there, it is definitely well loved by the citizens.

Of course, I hear the word “park” and I can’t help but think “geocache”. Since we don’t have internet access at the condo, our first stop was the local A&W for breakfast (who knew they had breakfast?) in order to get a few of the caches loaded into the GPS. Once that was accomplished, we headed out to do some exploration.

Our first planned stop was at the Vancouver Aquarium, but that stop turned into almost 4 hours! We really enjoyed it and took our time wandering around all the exhibits. Unfortunately, I realized that my camera had a dead battery JUST as we were entering the aquarium so I don’t have any pictures to share from today. I felt almost naked not carrying it around, but I managed to get over it. J One of the highlights of the trip was getting to see the baby Beluga Whale who was born back on June 10th. She was really cute and is the first second-generation whale to be born in captivity. Her mom was also born at the aquarium 13 years ago.

Moving on, we wanted to try to do a bike ride around the park along the seawall, but my hips were getting angrier and angrier at me all the time. Two days of being on my feet were really taking their toll. We did manage to find 2 geocaches while we were there, but want to go back to try a couple more.

Overall, the park was gorgeous from what we could see from the car. The trees are huge and old, but they lost a lot of them during a huge wind storm in 2006 and are still cleaning things up. There are still many large stumps from the “old growth” trees that once stood here and the second generation ones aren’t that far behind. Hopefully we will get a chance to go back a do some more exploring later this week.

Tomorrow we are hoping to make the drive up the “sea to sky” highway towards Whistler. From what we have heard the drive is gorgeous and well worth the gas money. We picked up food tonight to enjoy along the way and will hopefully get to visit the site the 2010 Winter Olympic Skiing events in Whistler. Everywhere we go there is merchandise and souvenirs for the Olympics and they don’t even happen for another 2 years! I guess they just like to plan ahead.