-Sunday July 1st Afternoon-
After our walk to the parks with kids and visiting the local Colqitlam Canada Day festival, we headed into downtown Vancouver to see that city’s parade. A dozen of us took the train, I don’t know what the total was, but it couldn’t have been too bad as an adult fare was less than $2.50 one way. The thing that was very intriguing was there were no turnstiles* and no conductors. I asked our host, “Why’d we buy tickets?” Her reply was, “Just in case a random Traffic Mountie asked for them.” Another fine example of the Canadian’s inherent politeness.
*They are working on installing turnstiles and they should be in place sometime next year.
First stop was to pose in front of the Olympic Flame from the 2010 Winter Games. As you can sort of tell, this is ground zero for the festivities even though the parade route is a couple of blocks over.
We made it over to a corner that was lightly populated near the end of the parade route that had some nice steps for viewing over the folks that would be lining the curb. We hadn’t planned our timing very well as we neglected to get dinner before heading downtown, so our choices were limited, but as it turned out their was a famous Canadian hamburger chain restaurant just a couple blocks away. We left the bulk of the group behind to keep claim on our spot and four of us headed to McDonalds.
We were not the only ones who were grabbing a bite to eat before the parade as the line was nearly to the door. I didn’t think we’d get anything to eat in time to see the parade, but apparently this wasn’t their first attempt at handling a huge crowd in a hurry as we made it out the door in about ten minutes. There was another line inside that was a little shorter, but a lot slower, the line to use the Ladies Room.
We got back to our corner with time enough to finish most of fast food before the parade, but it was no longer sparsely populated. It was jammed with seemingly more people than live in our fair city of Aiken. The parade included everything from a Scottish Pipe Band to a Chinese Dragon to Imperial Stormtroopers and after watching nearly the whole thing (or as much as we could handle), we headed for the train for the ride back to Colquitlam.
By the time we got back to the house, no one really wanted to head back to the park we were at earlier in the day to see the fireworks, so we sat on the back deck drinking wine and telling tales. Turned out it was a good thing that we didn’t go, as they cancelled the show because some knuckleheads jumped the fence surrounding the fireworks.