Canada, Day 5, Happy Father's Day!

Woohoo, we survived to the last day of our trip. For anybody who wants to follow the journey, I recommend going down to Day 1 and reading them in order, but hey, read it however you want!

I'm a lumberjack and I'm OK! Sorry, had to do it. This dude is next to the Squamish Adventure Center, so we had to get a quick shot.

This place looked pretty neat, although we didn't get a chance to go in.

We had a nice little breakfast at a local diner. Unbeknownst to Ron, we had wrapped and packed a couple presents for him we took in for him to open, or for Orion to open as was more the case. Unfortunately, I woke up with a horrible toothache. It had actually started bothering me the night before enough that I took some pain pills in the night. I only had a few with me, so I went down to a market to buy some more. I found the most awesome little natural fruit snacks that were kindof like fruit leather, but thicker. I wish I could find them back home.

I know this picture doesn't look like much, but this is a fairly famous chunk of rock. It is just outisde Squamish and is the second largest monolith in the world after Gibraltar!
So the Sea to Sky Highway goes up to Whistler, where the Winter Olympics are going to be in 2010. We feel very lucky we were traveling on the weekend, although it looks like alot of the work is being done at night. We had to include some of the roadwork pictures because this task is almost unimaginable. They are widening the highway, which means blasting out huge sections of rock and literally building out new walls that are basically cliffs. It looks like a war zone!

And you thought you were done with ferries, bwahaha. Just had to get this nice shot from the road. :)
First another ferry, then another lighthouse. This park was high on my list of places to see because the trail is through the last bit of old growth forest in the Vancouver area. And it was quite a lovely hike.
Oh my, a bench! Orion has some kind of fascination with benches. He has to sit on every one he sees. He will actually yell out, "A bench!" and go running over to them. This one apparently even put him in a reverant mood.

We tried to explain the idea of a walking stick to him. How silly of us.

First view of the lighthouse.
Another view from the keepers house.
Since we had made it to the area so early, we decided to take the time to hike down to the beach. So glad we did! This was the best treasurehunting yet, including beach glass. And there were some great tide pools in the rocks as well.

Not to mention yet another view of the lighthouse!
These pools had some interesting fish in them as well as all sorts of other creatures.
Like crabby crabs! These little guys were everywhere, and Orion loved them.
Lookin at stuff.


And on into town. At first Ron just wanted to get on the road, but I kept talking up Chinatown, so we decided to park and walk around a bit. Here is the gate.

There was a courtyard in front of the Chinese Gardens with all the zodiac symbols making a big circle. I took all of them because I am a geek, but I will only show here our family symbols, except I had to include the boar as she is portrayed nursing! How cool!
Ron is a rooster.
I commented how funny it would be if Orion was a monkey. Well, guess what? hahahah That makes it so much funnier that we have always called him monkey.
I am the horse.

Dragon had to be included because he is the coolest, and he is Sarah's symbol after all.

I had read about this place but had no idea it was FREE! How could we resist? Required lily pad picture in any Chinese Garden.
And more of what you would expect...
This goose cracked me up for some reason. He was the only one in the whole park, and he just stood on this rock the whole time we were there like some kind of sentinel.

So... this is the famous Sam Kee building. It was the main thing I wanted to see, but we had walked right by it the first time. It is known as being the world's skinniest building. The only problem is, it backs right up to another building! So it doesn't look really skinny at all, but maybe it wasn't always like that. At least we got a map and found it on the way back to the car. It does have an interesting story. The city basically took part of this guys land away from him, so he build this six foot wide building in protest!
Another cool old building near Chinatown. I would hate to have to use that fire escape!
Some military museum. Seemed crazy to me there was a tank just sitting alongside the road. You can also see the Canadian "Walk" symbol in this photo. I think theirs looks jauntier than ours haha.
And this picture is only included because it was the last picture we took on the trip. I am not even sure what that building is LOL. Some kind of science center I think. At this point, we were both really tired and just wanted to get home. We stopped at place for dinner just over the border, then blasted all the way back. Tomorrow's agenda: rest.