Canada Day by Day: First Stop, Vancouver, Vancouver, Canada

Time differences blow my mind. We take off from London Heathrow at 10:45 am, spend the equivalent of a working day plus commute in a flying tube then arrive at YVR at 11:45am. This makes today around 32 hours long. As if a 5am alarm call isn’t enough to mess up my sensitive body clock.

Still, at least the weather will be….oh, it’s raining. We wrestle our suitcases – full on monsters this time, none of this carry on lark – and other items onto the Skytrain. We miss a train whilst we queue behind various people that stare at the ticket machine as if they are trying to crack the Enigma Code. It’s a fifteen minute journey to Yaletown-Roundhouse where we emerge into torrential rain. We manage to find the 7-11 where our apartment keys are being held (this Keycafe thing is great) and then juggle the suitcases with a photograph of a Google map to locate our destination. We have a slight tussle with a non suitcase friendly barrier but otherwise we soon find our studio apartment and home for the next three days (As a bonus, I receive a message from our host suggesting that we stay on at the apartment until 7pm on Tuesday so we don’t have to worry about finding left luggage facilities. This is why i love Airbnb.) ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).