A few Greater Vancouver parents were chatting on Twitter about how several of us hadn’t met in real life. So, we’re about to rectify that! Introducing…

Greater Vancouver Twitter Parents Meetup I
Where: Vancouver Aquarium
When: Saturday, November 7th, 10 am

Bring your kids! Bring your significant other! Bring a snack! Everyone’s welcome. If you’re planning on coming, please leave a comment below, and retweet this post on Twitter so we can have lots of people meeting!

You can also RSVP to the event on Vancouver Tweetup.

There’s a Twitter list put together for people attending:

On Sunday, we played tourist in our own town and visited the Capilano Suspension Bridge. I had won a pair of passes from their Twitter account (@capsuspbridge). The “attraction” was better than we expected, with more than just the bridge … there was a boardwalk over the Capilano Canyon as well as their “Treetop Adventures” elevated boardwalk and tree-platforms. Also, they have several wild birds on display … a great horned owl, a kestral, and a red-tailed hawk. These birds were accompanied by some rather knowledgable handlers. Further, they have a significant First Nations display and interpretive area. Much more than just the bridge we expected!

Here’s a short video of our visit:

Today, I took Sean (brother-in-law) “up into the mountains”.  This is his first visit to BC, and wanted to see some of the BC mountains.  The weather’s been pretty miserable for the week he’s been here, but the weather prognosticators indicated that they expected today to be better than the rest of the preceding (and following) days so I swapped my Labour Day holiday with today.

We got up late, had a largish breakfast and made it to Cypress Bowl by about 11:30 am.  It was mostly sunny, with some puffy clouds haunting the mountain peaks.  Gwen dropped us off in the parking lot with a promise to pick us up around 6 pm.

The Mt. Strachan (pronounced “Strawn”) hike is one I’ve done at least a half-dozen times and is one of my favourites.  It starts in the Cypress Bowl parking lot and then you take the Howe Sound Crest Trail for about an hour towards The Lions.  Eventually you come to a meadow on the west side of Mt. Strachan and a short trail to a ravine the goes up to a pass between the North and South peaks of the mountain.  Climbing up the ravine (which is quite steep) is quite an endeavour.

It's steeper than it looks!

Snow still in the ravine

Lions look-off half way up

Once you achieve the pass, you climb up a similarly steep trail to gain the North Peak.  The view from the top is quite amazing, with a 360° view. The clouds broke just as we summited, making for the typical outstanding view.

Sean at the top of Mt Strachan

After rehydrating and chowing down a bit, we climbed down the North Peak and ascended the South Peak.  Along the way, we grabbed a geocache that hadn’t been found this year and had only been found once last year.  The South Peak is the top of chair lifts for Cypress Mountain, and the hike down from the South Peak parallels the ski runs a bit, and about 2/3 of the way down, you are actually forced to walk along the access road/ski run.

We were within view of the parking lot by about 3:30 pm — clearly we made much better time than I expected — and gave Gwen a call.  We made it down to the parking lot soon enough and then beat it over to the nearby Yew Lake to pick up another geocache before meeting Gwen and Aidan in the parking lot. And the rain held off until we were waiting to be picked up!

Yew Lake

All in all, 8.8 km hiking, 730 m total elevation gain, about 4.5 hours total time including breaks.

The GPS track is shown below, along with a Google Earth plot of the hike.

Mt. Strachan hike

Tonight was the opening night of the annual Vancouver fireworks festival.  This year it’s called the HSBC Celebration of Light, but in years past it was called other things as other sponsors mangled it.  I think my favourite was the Celebration of Fire.  But I digress.

Tonight’s competitor is Canada, and they’ve done a completely thematic “War of the Worlds” “Godzilla Attacks Vancouver” (?) sort of thing instead of the usual medley of songs.

It’s been utterly spectacular, even from our dining room.  Gwen and Kayla are down at Vanier Park, and I’m watching from home.

The timing to the music has been extraordinary, there have been some fireworks I’ve never seen before, and there have been some *very* large bursts too.  The trees in Choklit Park obscure the view a little bit, but I was surprised at how much was still visible.  Sadly as each year passes, we see less and less.  Maybe the Park Board can do something about that.

The competition continues on Saturday with the US’ entry followed by China next Wednesday and the finale on the Saturday after that.