Today was a lovely day by the standards of November in Vancouver. no rain, no wind, pleasant temperatures and plenty of geocaches to be found!

Cole Anderson (aka Jearsy on geocaching.com) who is a friend of Tamar and Adam, suggested that we get together and tackle the caches in Stanley Park. We had a marvelous time!

Here I am with Robbie Burns, after figuring out a puzzle cache:

…and Lord Stanley, while working on a Virtual Cache:

Then we made our way around the park until we got to the totem poles. Flat Katherine got very excited by the totem poles!

There were memorials and plaques all over the park, including on fountains:

Along the seawall, I spotted what I thought was a mermaid…

… but it turned out to be a girl in a wetsuit!

Cole found a Chinese dragon, so I took his picture (with Flat Katherine) in front of the dragon.

And here’s where the dragon came from:

We eventually made our way into the centre of the park and found a little pond (and two geocaches there!). There were plenty of chickadees, but not the Black-Capped sort we usually have in Newfoundland. I believe these were Chestnut-Backed Chickadees, found mainly in the Pacific Northwest. They were so tame and bold that they repeatedly landed on our hands.

We also saw about five different kinds of ducks and a sleeping heron:

Along the seawall, the snow-dusted mountains made the foliage glow:

We found a nice geocache near a truly massive tree. This tree is still alive, although on its second growth. Here I am, next to the tree, with Flat Katherine:

And here’s a vertical panorama I took of the whole tree:

There’s a neat spot called Siwash Rock in the park. It’s a seastack that was formed a very long time ago, when the sedimentary rock (which is soft) around a piece of granite (which is hard), wore away, leaving the pinnacle still standing.

Near Siwash, Flat Katherine found a waterfall:

And I couldn’t stop her from jumping in. The real Katherine would NEVER do something like that, would she?

Along the shore there were funny-looking birds called Oyster Catchers:

After we finished up the caches in Stanley Park, we made our way back toward Burnaby, stopping along the way to pick up a couple of caches here and there. One set of three caches that was particularly neat was along this salmon stream.

This particular stream was pretty neat, as the slopes were paved and cobblestoned. In between each slope was a level eddy of sorts. They went from the see upriver to various ponds and were meant for spawning salmon to use. The trail went right along side the salmon run. Unfortunately it’s the wrong time of year for salmon, but I can imagine that it would be pretty neat there, in-season.