Downtown Vancouver

View across the river to Granville Bridge
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Today we finally had a much needed sleep in. We set off about 10:30am in search of the Tilley Endurable store that Joe was keen to visit. We stumbled across one when we were in Toronto years back and Joe wanted to check out their new adventure/travel clothes. We got directions from the Concierge who said it was a 40min walk. This was fine as we had been eating way too much in the last week and the exercise would do us good.

As we wondered down Hornsby street, we had a chance to check out the shops in the area and the changing streetscape. An interesting thing that I saw was the cement pavements in one area we walked through had be stamped into with the shapes of fallen leaves. This was quite quaint and somewhat took the boringness of grey concrete away.

What the hell is an AquaBus?

The AquaBus we rode to Granville Island
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We walked down to the bottom of Hornsby St which brought us to a pier. Here we caught the AquaBus taxi across the river to the Granville Island Farmers Market. This was a fresh farmers market as well as artist shops selling their wares. The food area was just amazing and walking past the fresh fruit and vegetable stands was a treat - seeing varieties of apples etc that I had never heard of.

We stopped here to get a coffee and something for breakfast. We found a place called Muffin Granny de Paris, which had a display cabinet full of pastries, bagels, muffins, cakes and something called scrummies. I tried the Apricot Scrummy, which ended up having a texture very much like a fruit scone - only about 3 times the size. Joe had a raisin scrummy.

This flock of pigeons remind us of the pigeons in St Mark's Square in Venice
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After a delicious breakfast we wandered through some of the shops and then headed off up Granville street in search of the Tilley shop. Once we found our way we spent a good amount of time here picking up some handy items, including a hat each. The owner of the shop was quite impressed that we were Aussies and had come in a day early to Vancouver to visit their shop! We then headed off, retracing our steps, stopping at the Market for a mexican taco each for lunch, then headed back to the hotel. We got back here about 4pm, dumped our purchases and then walked around the local downtown area.

We had dinner at a close by Italian cafe, then later popped out for a coffee at a place called Canadian Blend - a Gloria Jeans type shop. I ended my day spending time updating our travel blog! We had to have an early night as tomorrow we have to set off at 6:15am for our check-in for the Rocky Mountains Train Trip.