Vancouver!

We arrived to gorgeous heavy clouds in Vancouver's Stanley Park.

Afterwards, we had our dinner and spotted the fourth rainbow of our trip at Spanish Banks Beach. 

We grew fond of Vancouver during our explorations.

I had been excited to try a vegan earl gray doughnut from Cartems Donuterie ever since Niall found this place months ago during his research. It was delicious (flowery and sweet), as I suspected it would be.

We stopped by the central public library, which takes up a whole city block and is loosely modeled after the Roman Colosseum.

The steam clock in the historic Gastown neighborhood (the oldest neighborhood in Vancouver) was a pretty cool sight. It was built in 1977 and is fed by the steam underground. There's a more complicated explanation as to how it works, but it's beyond me. It whistles, blows copious amounts of steam, and makes me feel like I'm living in a different time. 

Big cities are pretty wonderful because you can:

 bump into things like a garden planted the bed of a truck,

take advantage of efficient public transportation,

and find spots like Tera V Burger, where you can eat a vegan cheeseburger that tastes like the real deal. 

We experienced a downpour the next day. It was pretty magical to wake up, nice and dry, with the rain pounding above our heads. Thankfully, Niall had enough foresight to rig up a tarp roof for us ahead of time.

We decided to bum around a little bit and did laundry. It cleared up, but we had this weird moment where we thought we may just hang out in the campground's laundry room and use the internet. 

We wanted to save money, it had been rainy.

What? We were in Vancouver!  Luckily, we quickly realized this and headed out to see the artsy neighborhood of Granville Island. 

I'm so glad we did. It's not an island, but a peninsula on False Creek.

There are these super cute floating houses on the water. How cool would it be to live in one of these?

There's some boating and fishing activity that takes place there.

There's a public market open seven days a week. Heaven.

 There are all these great shops, artist studios and inspiring corners.

Just think, we almost missed out on all that to hang out in the laundry room.