Saturday May 21, 2022 Vancouver, Canada

Spring Flowers in Full Bloom Everywhere
Abandoned Barge on the Waterfront
Paul, Kent and Ken
More Spring Flowers
Kent, Steve and Mark

A view of the spring leaves in Stanley Park

This morning Kent spent working on his emails from the past several days while Mark ventured out on a walk through the local neighborhood. The city streets are filled with beautiful spring blossoms everywhere. Most of the streets are tree lined and most every building has lush landscaped beds of flowers out front. Many of the trees have gorgeous white flowers while the beds are filled with azaleas, rhododendron bushes, hydrangeas, tulips, irises and a variety of other local blooming plants.

This winter included plenty of severe weather causing a barge to wash ashore in a king tide not far from our hotel. After attempting to find a way to move the barge it was decided that the barge would need to be cut up and scrapped for its metal. The demolition of the barge is scheduled to begin next week.

In the afternoon friends Ken and Paul came to our hotel and we walked along the sea wall into Stanley Park catching up. After our walk we stopped into the Sylvia Hotel Restaurant for wine, salads and dessert. It was so good to see them after so many years and to hear about their retirement, Mahjong playing, lunches at the local senior center, travel experiences and more.

In the late afternoon we wound our way to a dear friend who luckily happens to be a doctor. Dr. Steve’s services were needed for our medically monitored Covid-19 test prior to boarding our Holland America ship the following day. Steve lives just a few blocks from the Sylvia Hotel so it was a short ten-minute walk to his home. He is recently retired and has his gorgeous penthouse condo on the market, hoping to sell it. Getting the business out of hand first we completed out Covid-19 tests and we were both negative. That was a relief.

We then enjoyed drinks on a large terrace overlooking the city, Stanley Park and the English Bay. The weather was perfect with sunshine and temperatures that had reached nearly 70 degrees. Kent and Dr. Steve met in 1981 and so there were a lot of years, people and stories to get caught up on.

After drinks we took a short walk over to Denman Street where we dined at a Spanish tapas restaurant called Espana. There we enjoyed more drinks, a variety of tapas, a large skillet of paella and churros for dessert with warm chocolate sauce for dipping. The food was very nice but more important was our time visiting with Steve. We hope to be able to see him again soon before too many years pass us by.