Sunday, September 17th - Another Vancouver Volksmarch.

Despite the fact that we were a bit stiff and sore when we awoke, we decided after breakfast to spend the day walking another Volksmarch in Stanley Park. The sky had clouded over and the low-lying clouds were occasionally spitting a light rain at us, so we donned our rain gear and set off again for Stanley Park. The route of this Volksmarch was similar to our walk the day before up to the water park where we turned inland toward Beaver Lake. One noticeable difference was that this walk was at low tide and we could see a lot more of the shoreline. We saw several blue herons looking for breakfast. The tide was so low, in fact, that the "Girl in a Wetsuit" statue was completely high and dry; I suppose she felt a bit like a fish out of water!

We followed a small stream up to Beaver Lake. As soon as we left the shoreline we plunged directly into the temperate rainforest that is the natural climax forest for Stanley Park. Some of those trees were huge, about 10 feet in diameter at the base and well over 100 feet tall. You know a tree is big when you have to use the panoramic setting on the camera to take its picture!

Many of the giant trees were red cedar, and they had a soft bark and a beautiful straight grain. We also enjoyed the wonderful cedar scent that was wafting through the air as we walked the forest trails. We even saw good examples of the "nursery" logs of old, dead cedars that had become the base for new trees growing right on top of them; it certainly created some odd looking root systems for the new trees!

Beaver Lake turned out to be a shallow pond almost choked with some kind of pond lily and cattails. If they let the natural progression continue I expect that the "lake" will become a meadow in a few years. Still, it currently has at least a little water and supports at least one family of very hopeful ducks that waddled over to greet us when we stopped to take pictures.

From Beaver Lake we continued crossing the peninsula to the Pacific Ocean side and turned onto a path that paralleled the seashore. The official route of the Volksmarch was back around Lost Lagoon, but we opted to continue walking along the shore down toward Granville Island and spend some time there before returning to our hotel.

The bridge to Granville Island is for automobiles only, so instead we took one of the passenger ferries that regularly ply the waters of False Creek over to the island. Once on the island we took some time to wander around the indoor farmer's market that is one of the central attractions. Then we walked to the Model Train and Ship Museum that we had run across when we visited with Lois, Bill, and Phyllis before our cruise.

The museum, as its name would imply, had a large collection of model trains and ships. Most of these were displayed in Plexiglas boxes that made photography difficult, but some of the models were so large that they were simply displayed as is. The large trains all looked like functional models, and I really wanted to see one of those fired up and chugging down the track.

Although the largest trains were for display only, the museum did have an elaborate HO scale layout on the top floor. It was about equal to one section of the Model Train Museum that we visited in Hamburg, Germany, on Ausflug 33, but customized to represent the Pacific coast region of British Columbia. The models of huge cedar trees that were included in the exhibit were really quite similar to the real trees that we had seen earlier in the day in Stanley Park, and I wondered if they had used a kit or actually hand-made each trunk, branch, and leaf, which would have been a truly painstaking task.

We finished up the museum by visiting a hallway with models of tugboats and a room dedicated entirely to models of submarines. There I learned that the Japanese had built an aircraft-carrying submarine at the end of World War II. The sub carried three small fighter-bombers that would fold into the sub's 15-foot diameter hangar, truly an amazing feat of engineering. I just wish I could have seen a photo of exactly how they folded those aircraft into such a tiny space.

Since I had enjoyed a museum, it was Monika's turn next and she wanted to revisit the silk weaving store and purchase some skeins of dyed silk for crocheting. But along the way we were sucked into a kid's mall consisting of about 10 stores that all carried toys or children's things of one kind or another plus a game room on the second floor that was just chock a block with giggling, yelling, playing children. The stores had genuinely high quality items (at high quality prices!) and we kept ourselves from buying things for our granddaughter only by reminding ourselves that we had over a week to go on our trip and no place to put anything in our luggage. After the extreme hustle and bustle of the kid's mall, we relaxed at the Granville Island micro brewery across the street where Monika sampled the four types of beer they brewed there.

Refreshed, we curled back to the silk weaving store and Monika did find some skeins of dyed silk that met her approval. I was happy because that was one piece of unfinished business left over from the bus tour of Vancouver we had taken with Lois, Phyllis, and Bill before the cruise. We walked back to the ferry for the quick trip across False Creek to Vancouver proper and then began the long trek back to the hotel. Along the way we picked up some more groceries at Safeway for our evening meal so that once we reached our hotel room we could just put up our feet and relax for the rest of the evening. I finished updating the journal around 7 p.m. and after taking showers we immediately turned in as we had to awaken at 4:15 a.m. the next morning to catch the 5:30 bus from Vancouver to Seattle to catch our Amtrak train south.