Vancouver, BC

Vancouver is cool. Mike wants to sell everything and stay forever. I don't blame him -- it is certainly somewhere we would like to visit again. Some observations about Vancouver:

• Not a lot of smoking here. (Smoke filled bars are one thing we are NOT looking forward to when we get back to Philadelphia)
  
  
• The views are amazing, and there are a lot of seaplanes.
  
  
• The Thai, Chinese and Korean food in FANTASTIC. In fact, the Best Thai food I have had outside of Thailand was last night at SalaThai.
  
  
• Because Vancouver is on an island, its real estate is limited, so residential buildings are being built tall and thin, and spaced in such a way as to preserve sight corridors. The Buildings are built with great care here, and there seems to be a lot of trouble taken by developers to integrate the street life into high rise buildings, to creat an "urban village" at the street level, and then also and to protect the sightlines of neighboring buildings. Almost every building has a balcony for each tenant, and a good view from most windows because of that care, and there is a great deal of integration between the street-level life that happens at the base of the building, and the rest of the neighborhood.Its a pretty cool thing. The average price for a townhome is about 350,000 Canadian. There is lots of development going on, lots of condos being built and lots of people live in the urban space and use it well.
  
  
• Last but not least, we saw a hybrid taxi today (a Toyota Prius) and just thought that was pretty cool. There is also much talk about fuel efficiency and energy alternatives such a fuel cells and the like. We like that kind of talk... especially as we pay the horrendous GAS prices out here, which have been as much as $2.60 a gallon (and we arent even in California yet).

We will definitely make a trip back here at some point. Tomorrow is Canada day here so there's tons going on, and our hotel room is PHAT.

So we're having fun. We are a bit homesick though...for what home? We aren't sure… But as we forget the awfulness of the move from Virginia we are getting more and more excited for the move into Philly and into our new house. Both of us are on the mend from the colds, but somehow still mucus-filled. Mike is much much better though and this Hyatt stay is doing us wonders of good. We just got out of the hot tub and we are enjoying watching TV and hanging out in a room... When you spend all that time in the car, a little hotel room feels like a palace.

So here is the rest of our schedule as it stands right now (all subject to change of course...don't try to nail us down too much, we're nomads!!!!):

1. Seattle, Washington: July 2 & 3
2. Olympic National Park, then down Oregon and California Coast: July 4th - July 8th or 9th
3. San Francisco Bay Area: July 8 - 13
4. Santa Cruz, California: July 13-17
5. Denver, Colorado: July 22 - 24
6. Taos, NM: July 24-26
7. Drive back to Philadelphia, PA

Happy Canada Day!