Vancouver, BC - The Grand Trunk Hostel

I have spent the last 3 nights in Vancouver, BC at a $16/night shanty hostel in Gastown. The place had character, what can I say.

I got here by taking a ferry from Nanaimo (on Vancouver Island) to Vancouver's Horseshoe Bay, three days ago. From Horseshoe Bay, enjoyed a pleasant, 90 minute bike ride alongside a beautiful, windy (read wine-dy) coast that evoked a longing forMalibu's lovely stretch of the PCH I sometimes drove when I lived in SoCal.

I came to the city with a mission: to buy a bicycle trailer (that is a cargo trailer to tow behind my bike). As you may not know (because I don't think I have fully told the story yet) I crashed my bike in a rainforest on Vancouver Island. In the event, I had the unfortune of breaking my front bag rack and the rack-mount eyelets on my carbon-fiber fork -- in other words, there was no way I could continue carrying my stuff with front panniers (saddlebags) any longer. It was either get a trailer, or buy a new (probably ~$500 fork). I chose to look for a trailer.

So the second day in Vancouver, I found and bought a used Bob's Yak Trailer for $200. And to prevent my damaged fork from completely breaking, I applied epoxy glue to the shredded carbon fibers around the broken rack mounts on my fork.

I enjoyed Vancouver very much. One day, lost, I wandered into the New Amsterdam Cafe, and became found. New Amsterdam Cafe is one of three legal spots in Canada where you can smoke freely. And I met some pretty funny (okay maybe slightly sketchy) characters there. At one point, I found myself in the company of four unlikely-grouped individuals: a particular-looking gentleman in a suit sporting a corncob pipe, an Austrailian outbacker, a man who claimed he was "The Hairy Pothead", and okay-- yeah one really sketchy guy. I just had to have a picture taken.