Vancouver (3)

Playlist
John Coltrane – Sun Ship
Glenn Gould – Music from the Movies

Up at 7 and found all the tracks from Coltrane’s “Sun Trip”, which I bought yesterday, on my compilations jukebox, due to it containing the 8CD set of complete Impulse recordings by his quartet – nice to have the original album though for the equivalent of a couple of quid...

Breakfast at 8 and one Canadian couple were gone, replaced by two young Germans on the first leg of a round the world tour...

Once again breakfast was superb and was accompanied by further exchanges of ideas and tales of places to visit in the city...

At 9:20 we left and started walking towards Queen Elizabeth Park but we underestimated the distance of the walk and gave up after around 50 minutes and took the bus into town followed by the sea bus to North Vancouver and a further bus to Lynn Canyon (a tip from this morning) with it’s scary rope bridge crossing, forest trail and lagoon...

We stopped for some ice cream before taking a bus back down to the sea bus terminal, where we caught another bus to take us to the bottom of the Grouse Mountain Cable Car...

At the summit we saw two grizzly bears whose mother had been killed leaving them orphans – they are being looked after in a large compound...

We also enjoyed a display of birds of prey and a spectacular lumberjack show, including a well worked “member of the audience” routine, which culminated in the chap in question at the top of a 60ft pole standing on his head – certainly made my legs wobble...

The views from the top of the mountain were some of the most spectacular we’d seen so far...

Eventually we took the cable car back down, passing a couple of wedding parties on the way set to take their vows at the top accompanied by a bagpiper...

Back to Vancouver via the sea bus – we walked to Downtown and took another bus up to 7th Avenue (can you tell we had day passes today?) before walking back to 4th where we enjoyed a couple of excellent pizzas at a packed Saturday Night Hell’s Kitchen...

We walked home and finished off the day with some reading...

I listened to some Glenn Gould performances whilst reading my new book on his theories and philosophy of music, recording and performance...



Highlight of the Day : Grouse Mountain