July 14, 2022

Queen Elizabeth Park

By roads-rus

When we knew we were going to visit Vancouver, BC for 3 days before leaving on a cruise to Alaska, Ruth and I composed a list of must revisit options. On our list were the Van Dusen Garden that we never made it to, one restaurant, a few food emporiums, and 2 other parks including legendary Stanley. We also made it to Famous Foods and Queen Elizabeth Park.

Queen Elizabeth Park was dedicated by the current queen of England’s father when he visited this city in 1939. This 13 acre city park is on the highest point in this city, has a fantastic restaurant called Seasons, and provides the best view of this entire urban center from a mountain top that was once a quarry. For these 3 reasons, we were driven to go to Seasons again.

It was worth the effort! Also on top of Little Mountain a short distance from Seasons in the Park is the Bloedel Conservatory. Ruth ducked into the Bloedel to see its 100 birds and 500 exotic plants while I parked our vehicle in front of this restaurant 45 minutes before it opened for the day. She already had a seat in Seasons by the time I joined her in the already crowded restaurant. Seasons also offers valet parking for 10 dollars, but parking was no problem. We both had the mushroom soup and it was delicious. While we ate it, we watched Vancouverites explore the quarry garden below our window.

We visited Famous Foods for the first time on this trip to Vancouver. Ruth especially enjoyed this unique urban store at 1595 Kingsway and bought a lot of prepackaged products to take home. In a city with both many Whole Foods stores and several Save-on supermarkets, Famous is certainly a different concept. It offers a lot of unusual bagged flours, interesting cookies, and trail mixes that are one of a kind. We found and bought a lot of Bigoli pasta that we had only seen for sale in Venice, Italy, and in one kitchen store in Melbourne, Australia. Unfortunately, we had lost our taste for it by the time we got home and tried it. It simply did not taste the same as it did in Venice for some reason.

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 Thursday, July 14th, 2022 at 7:16 pm and posted in Great City. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

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