Jun 26 2008
RV Adventure, Day 13: Second full day in Vancouver
As was growing customary, we once again woke up to bright blue skies and comfortable temperatures.
Running out of clean clothes there was a necessity to do some laundry before we did anything else. While Christie and JulieAnn took care of this task, I fought with our newly acquired D-Link WiFi repeater only to discover it’s seeming utter uselessness - not only would it barely pickup signals that my Macbook alone were receiving by itself (!) but I discovered after looking at the troubleshooting guide that it was only compatible with a small number of D-Link routers, seemingly offering no guarantee that it would repeat any signals that didn’t emanate from one of the small list of outdated D-Link models. I performed a firmware upgrade with hope that it would help the situation, but even afterwards it was still unable to connect successfully to virtually any of the WiFi options, not even to the actual D-Link router that was feeding WiFi to the campground. Disgusted, I packed it up again and planned to simply return it - what a piece of junk.
Our first destination today was the Capilano Suspension Bridge in north Vancouver. Me and Christie had done this (tourist-trap) bridge once before and it was an expensive adventure, but enjoyable. A coupon that our friends had given us made it vastly less expensive, a great bonus.
They had actually expanded the entire experience quite a lot since we last visited so it turned out that we spent about three hours total. Plenty of video and pictures were shot, and the kids had a ball exploring the gift shop afterwards.
Our second destination for the day was the ocean - the kids were excited to visit the waterfront, and I was hoping to catch a tide change so that the kids could experience it. We returned to the trailer for a quick lunch and then headed towards one of the countless beaches in central Vancouver with hope of catching the forecasted 3:45PM incoming tide.
The kids actually had a riot at the beach. Many of the things that are commonplace to anyone who lives near the ocean (Clams, shells, crabs, etc) were all new to our kids and the first hour or two was spent simply splashing along in the surf collecting interesting things for their collections. They then found a small isolated section of the beach where there was a small water outflow and we all had fun digging and playing in the water. Sometimes the simplest things bring the most fun.
Before long we found ourselves having spent most of the afternoon at the beach, and it was now wearing into the evening hours. We headed back to the trailer (finding ourselves stuck in the clogged rush-hour traffic) and then enjoyed dinner.
Our neighbors had departed this morning so we without any other social neighbors, so after enjoying some television we went for a swim and discussed our plans for the following days. Unfortunately we discovered that with only two full days left in Vancouver (our schedule has us departing Saturday morning) we had more left to do then what time might allow, so I looked into the possibility of adjusting our schedule to allow one more day in Vancouver.
It might just work.