July 8, 2022

Three Nights in Vancouver

By roads-rus

Ruth and I had not been to Vancouver, BC because of COVID since 2019. Up to that year, going there had been an annual event. Our favorite restaurant in the world is there, and we had missed eating in it. When we knew that we were leaving on an Alaskan cruise from this city in 2022, we booked this restaurant and hoped for the best. This could have been a travel disaster but was not because we didn’t let it be. We ate there happily after several disasters.

There were some delays. It took us 3 hours to cross the US/Canada border. We arrived at the well-placed Comfort Inn where we usually stayed about 5 pm. We still had time to make our dinner reservation at 5:45 because we could walk to the Blue Water Cafe from this location. But then the problems began. The Comfort Inn had become the Belmont Hotel. I don’t know how it happened, but someone had booked us into a Comfort Inn back home in Vancouver, WA instead.

A lady who had been staying at The Belmont and did not like her room offered it to us for 2 nights. We accepted this offer gladly because there were no other rooms available in this entire city. The rooms at this well-placed Comfort Inn were small. The hotel management refused to let her cancel her reservation but agreed to let us have her room under the circumstances. We could have it for the next 2 nights. Ruth headed for a nearby Holiday Inn to see about a room for the 3rd night.

I did not know where this Holiday Inn was, so I headed for our dinner reservation. A couple helped me park near the Blue Water Cafe at 1095 Hamilton Street. Long story short, the staff at our dinner reservation greeted me like a long lost patron. Ruth soon called from the Holiday Inn to announce that miraculously she had booked a room for the 3rd night. I had no idea where she was but was glad to hear from her and told her to join me for dinner. She did.

Our waiter treated us like royalty and told us that Blue Water Cafe, which is expensive but has a large Asian clientele, had never closed during our long absence. We had a great dinner at our favorite place and learned that it had joined 9 other restaurants in a Toptable Group. Some of them are in California. They have a new place opening in Victoria, BC this year. I highly recommend dining there in the popular Yaletown neighborhood of Vancouver, BC if you ever get to this city.

On the cruise, both Ruth and I got COVID, so I do not recommend that you travel this way. The good news is that we have both recovered.

Hank

About roads-rus

Since the beginning, I've had to avoid writing about the downside of travel in order to sell more than 100 articles. Just because something negative happened doesn't mean your trip was ruined. But tell that to publishers who are into 5-star cruise and tropical beach fantasies. I want to tell what happened on my way to the beach, and it may not have been all that pleasant. My number one rule of the road is...today's disaster is tomorrow's great story. My travel experiences have appeared in about twenty magazines and newspapers. I've been in all 50 states more than once and more than 50 countries. Ruth and I love to travel internationally--Japan, Canada, China, Argentina, Hungary, Iceland, Italy, etc. Within the next 2 years we will have visited all of the European countries. But our favorite destination is Australia. Ruth and I have been there 9 times. I've written a book about Australia's Outback, ALONE NEAR ALICE, which is available through both Amazon & Barnes & Noble. My first fictional work, MOVING FORWARD, GETTING NOWHERE, has recently been posted on Amazon. It's a contemporary, hopefully funny re-telling of The Odyssey. View all posts by roads-rus
This entry was posted on Friday, July 8th, 2022 at 8:39 pm and posted in Great City. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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