Alaskan cruise trip report - Day 10 - Vancouver

Vancouver

As I mentioned earlier, we had second seating for dinner for our first two cruises and this time we went with main dining. One down side of main dining is breakfast disembarkation morning is early also. So instead of eating at 8:30 or 8:45, we had to be at Animator’s Palate for our last meal on board at 7:30. Ouch.

Roger and I woke at 6:30 and got ourselves ready and then I woke Emmaline up at 7:15 and got her dressed and ready to go. There were more tears. After I picked up our photo CD from Shutters, we enjoyed our final meal with Nebojsa and Chanman. Our table mates skipped breakfast in the main dining room and Emmaline was sad that Katie wasn’t there to have breakfast.

We reluctantly left and went to wait in the Promenade Lounge to wait for them to announce that our group could disembark (Green Tinkerbell). We had never been through this waiting time before since, with second seating, by the time we were done with breakfast, all the groups had already been called and we could just leave the ship when we were ready.

As we were disembarking, we ran into our table mates and the girls were able to say goodbye. We picked up our luggage and made our way through customs easily and found the CDS baggage service so that they could transfer our baggage to the airport for us. It turned out, they were able to transfer them directly to the Fairmont hotel at the airport where we would be staying overnight. That done, we made our way up to the street to catch a bus to Stanley Park a little after 9:00. It was a beautiful warm and sunny day. We were all wearing long pants and I think we all regretted it before long!

I’m super glad that I had already purchased our day transit passes at London Drugs prior to embarking on our cruise. That way, we were able to just head right out to the bus. We hopped on the number 19 bus which ended right at Stanley Park and got off to go to the Vancouver Aquarium. This time around I had not purchased tickets online because there was a discount if you display a public transit ticket. I showed the tickets, netting us $2 off per ticket.

The aquarium was very nice. It wasn’t overly huge, but we enjoyed all the exhibits there for about an hour and a half. We left the aquarium and set off to find a bus stop for the Stanley Park Shuttle operated by Vancouver Trolley. The shuttle came every 30 minutes and we had missed one 10 minutes earlier so we had to wait 20 minutes. Eventually one came by and we got on board. A full loop of the park took one hour and they had two shuttles running. We realized that if we got off the shuttle to see any sights, we wouldn’t make our reservation at 12:30 at the Stanley Park Teahouse. We arrived a bit early to the Teahouse (12:15) but they had no problem seating us. We probably didn’t need a reservation.




The Teahouse was perhaps a bit overrated and a little spendy. I knew it would be spendy, but I guess I was expecting more for the money we paid. We probably would have been better off at one of the other restaurants in Stanley Park.

After lunch we jumped back on the shuttle and rode to the totem poles and enjoyed wandering around there before we walked over to the Brockton Point Lighthouse to take in the view. We hopped back on the shuttle and rode it back around to the bus stop to take the bus back into Vancouver.








We got off the bus in Gastown to check out the Steam Clock. While in Gastown we also picked up some snacks for the airplane the following day as well as some pastries to tide us over the next morning in our room. By late afternoon we were pretty tired and scrapped our original plan for dinner (which would have required another bus ride) and instead ate in Gastown. We had a hard time finding a place that was kid-friendly, but eventually settled on pizza that was...fine. Emmaline was tired and a little cranky so we took the bus to the nearest train station and took the train over to the airport for our final night stay in Vancouver.

We checked into our room at the Fairmont in the airport and reshuffled our luggage a bit for the trip home. Our flight the following morning was at 6:45 so we would have an early morning the next day. We said goodnight to Vancouver and crawled into bed for our last night of vacation.



Click here for final thoughts on our Alaskan Adventure.