haveyouseenmypassport

Easter weekend! For us that means four whole days off! For me anyways. Sadly for Sarah she only gets three days off. But after a somewhat same and dullish week I was absolutely totally ready for a four days of relaxation and general pottering!

Amber and Simon gave us a call Friday morning while we were recovering from hangovers and suggested that a trip to the wilderness might be the order of the day. We agreed and half an hour later we were on our way to the Lighthouse National Park. I've been pretty subdued in my attempts to get "out-doorsy" here, so when I came to the national park I was a little concerned that we were going to have to hike. While we weren't hiking as such, someone had the bright idea to go rock hopping!

Which was totally fun, if not a little bit scary. Sheer ledges and jagged rocks below are a good motivator to not fall off the rock you're currently hopping on. This lighthouse turned out to be a bit of a let down as it was on private property, but it is definitely a tourist attraction as we had to cue up to get photos of it. Not in an organised cue or anything, just polite tourists waiting their turn to have the photo. Ours turned out pretty well!

As entertaining as the Llighthouse was, we weren't even a third of the way through our day. Piling back into the jeep in the carpark we set out for Lynn Canyon national park. There is a suspension bridge there that is free to go across. Basically you're standing above a canyon (funnily enough Lynn Canyon) and below there are rapids and waterfalls and generally winderness like events.

Apparently some stupidly large number of people have been killed shile trying to jump off the waterfalls or swim down the rapids. That's sad. Many of them were in the 80's, or so I gather from the memorial stones.

Getting to the bottom of the canyon saw a break for lunch. Now I'm not sure why, but it seems that Canadians like to pop to the local national park to smoke a spliff. Why? I don't know wither. Everywhere we walked there was the extremely pungent smell of skunk being burned. Bizarre. But what's more bizzare is that the forest here has no smell. I didn't notice it when we were by the sea, but in the middle of the forest there was absolutely no smell. In the rare moments when the ganja wasn't in the air there was none of the wilderness smell that I thought there would be. But anyways.

So we had our lunch, did some more walking and had Amber, Simon and Mark over for a roast and a watch of the film Kenny. Kenny comes highly recommended to anyone who has not yet seen it. 2 bottles of wine, 1 bottle of Bacardi and a few beers later, we were all sufficients smashed to turn in for the night.

As if we didn't have enough excercise on the Friday, we decided to go roller blading around Stanley park with Sarah's friend Erika on Saturday. Now I'm a bit sad cause I finally came across some locals that I didn't like. Strangely they were both from the bike/skate hire places on Denman street in downtown Vancouver. Perhaps a life of hiring things to people who are clearly going to enjoy their day much more that you is enough to make anyone turn into a nasty pastie... Not sure. But these people are RUDE. Don't bother asking for your student discount either. The sign means that you just go in there expecting to get a discount. Skating was way fun despite the unpleasant people who hire out the skates.

I was trying not to get too aggressive about it, but Sarah kept egging me on and saying that she was a better skater than me. This could have resulted in disaster if I hadn't stopped just before the collision!