Vancouver Day 4: Biking around Stanley Park

One of the biggest selling points of choosing to stay at The Burrard is it has ten bicycles to borrow. When I shared this with a friend, he said "what is the likelihood you will go biking in January?" I reminded him he doesn't know Don.

Friday's forecast was a very un-Vancouver-like sunny, 42 degrees. Even if we borrowed the bicycles for an hour, it was still worth a try.

Don being Don, insisted we pick up the bicycles first thing in the morning lest they are all borrowed and we have to make new plans. A great plan on a spring, summer, or fall day, but it was still January and the hotel seemed pretty empty. I think we were the first people to borrow bicycles. At the end of our ride, most (if not all) were still available.

Thanks to Google maps, we found a wide alleyway leading from across the street from our hotel directly downhill to Stanley Park. Don is an avid cyclist. I have a fear or riding in traffic. At home I'm good on our side streets that lead to trails, but I rarely venture onto roads with traffic lights and merging traffic.

We left before our daily stop at Café Elysian, but found Delaney's just before entering the park. Delaney's feels like a neighborhood café where the barista knows what you want the moment you step in the door and hands it to you as you walk up to pay. Friends sit at tables catching up on the goss. I loved the repurposed antiques, giving it a homey feel. I enjoy Café Elysian, but it feels sterile compared with Delaney's. 

Stanley Park is a 400-hectare urban park in the middle of Vancouver, akin to NYC's 340-hectare Central Park. The 10-kilometer (6.2 mile) Seawall loop is one of Vancouver's top destinations. As this part of Vancouver is a peninsula, almost all parts have waterfront views. The trick, though, for cyclists is that you are only allowed to pedal in one direction. We entered by A-Maze-Ing Laugher, a 2009 bronze statue Yue Minjun, a Chinese artist, created for the 2009-2011 Biennial held in Vancouver. Simply looking at the 14 men all with Yue Minjun's face laughing is enough to make the most cynical person smile. We couldn't figure out how to enter, or which direction we were supposed to travel, when we were immediately faced with a sign saying No Bicycles. We asked a local, who is not a cyclist, and he sent us down a busy street with a bike lane to catch it someplace else.

We ended up on a detour that took us up trails pitted with tree roots, and detours due to trees being cut down. Made me more fully appreciate the sign I saw near the Laughing Men statue (as the locals call it) that asked people to stop the logging and Save Stanley Park. The detour took us to a sidewalk. As I pointed to an extremely large tree the path went around, I went too close to the edge and landed in a fern marking the third time I fell in week. The fern provided a soft landing, but it was downhill so the bike and I rolled a bit. An SUV with three kind Canadians stopped to offer to take me someplace safe. I brushed off my ego and continued the ride.

The loggers pointed us further downhill to the seawall loop where we quickly identified the correct direction (clockwise). 

The actual path feels like a figure-8 as it passes a lagoon on the right, a few tiny beaches, a lighthouse, and ducks under the Lion's Gate Bridge as it hugs the cliff to the right. Very picturesque. So picturesque, Don lined up at least 15 photo spots with our borrowed bicycles to make a 2026 calendar (or a March to February 2025 one). The pictures in this post are all ones I took, similar ones will make the calendar. There were many people walking it and running -- both of which are allowed in either direction. Most cyclists were tourists like us. I imagine other times of the year it is packed. We did have some icy patches to contend with. Researching the loop as I write this a few weeks after our trip, the website says parts of the path are closed due to ice. I'm not surprised since last week it snowed in downtown Vancouver.

We met a family on holiday from Brisbane. Their accents sounded so much like Jo and Andrew, I nearly asked if they were from Brisbane. We joked about doing a house swap. Well, they were joking and I was serious. Their house comes with tw teenagers. Ours comes with a 22-year old. The wife and I had a long chat, long enough her husband called to make sure she was okay. She reminded me at our age four years is really not that long. She looked worried for us, and recognizes she has the privilege  of tuning him out. She emphasized the rest of the world is not in favor of T. There are kind people in the world. 

Taken by our new Brisbie friends 

A tiny detour off the path in the Brockton Point section of Stanley Park are nine totem poles. They were created between 1961 and 2009. Remembering from the talk at Capilano Suspension Bridge that the art of creating totem poles was banned until 1951, and that totem poles take years to create, makes the 1961 totem pole even more special. A true gift. 

Lots of selfies taken on the trip

More views after the totem poles.

Girl in a Wetsuit is modeled after the Little Mermaid
statue in Copenhagen

We reached the end of the trail but decided to go a little further. The path continued near where we took the aquabus to Granville Island. We rode 12.5 miles before stopping for lunch, and another .75 miles afterwards. Don's GPS says we were out for six hours, and rode for two of them. Much of the rest of the time was spent enjoying the scenery and taking pictures.

Bike rack in memory of an cyclist
who enjoyed touring around the globe

Sign of spring

We finished the outing with a lunch stop for salad. The evening was spent with a trip to the Lindt store for dark mint chocolate truffles (we were told by someone in the Princeton store that the shops in Canada get the good dark chocolate) and a cup of decadent dark hot chocolate, a stop in Gastown for a souvenir Don was thinking about, and the I Fly Canada movie. The I Fly series is just like Soarin' Over California at Disneyland, but over Canada instead. Felt overpriced to me, but as it was the off-season we did not have to wait to see it. In line we met a woman from Prince George (eight to ten hours north of Vancouver) who said she last came here with her dad just before he died suddenly. She was planning to cry through the movie thinking of him. She stayed for I Fly Hawaii, but we left for diner at our new favorite restaurant (Burgoo).