Let the games begin
VANCOUVER | Host city for 2010 Winter Olympics has waters and hills to bring out the amateur athlete in everyone
VANCOUVER, British Columbia -- It's easy to catch Olympic fever in Canada's third-largest city.
Just about everywhere you look, a new stadium, venue or public works project is popping up in preparation for the 2010 Olympic Winter Games in Vancouver and nearby Whistler resort.
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DON'T MISS: Granville Island on the southern shore of False Creek. Locals and tourists flock here for the galleries, shops, entertainment and breweries, plus a huge public market packed with fresh food perfect for a picnic. Save room for lunch at Go Fish, 1505 W. First Ave. at Fisherman's Wharf, a short walk off the island. Try the fish tacos and fish 'n' chips fried in local beer batter; (604) 730-5040. Back on the island, you can rent kayaks at Ecomarine Ocean Kayak Centre, 1668 Duranleau St., (888) 425-2925, www.ecomarine.com.
TIP: Visitors can no longer recoup the 5 percent GST tax tacked on to just about everything, from hotel rooms to the new camera and pair of glasses you might need to buy if your kayak happens to flip in False Creek.
The palpable anticipation of this international sporting event unleashed the amateur athlete in my husband and me during a visit last summer. Beijing was inconveniently located on the other side of the world, so we decided to hike, bike, kayak and turn Vancouver into our outdoor playground. That's not hard to do in a city blessed with this kind of location.
Surrounded by protected waters and mountains, Vancouver is one of those places where locals can brag about being able to ski, sail and golf -- all in the same day. You don't have to venture far to find scuba diving, rock climbing, mountain biking, kiteboarding or legally sanctioned skinny-dipping at Wreck Beach.
In Vancouver, it's all about the outdoors, which might explain why the skyline shimmers with buildings made of glass.
The Opus Hotel in Yaletown (Vancouver's hip, renovated warehouse district) made it simple for us to get started. We borrowed a couple of the hotel's bikes and pedaled out to Stanley Park, one of the biggest urban greenspaces in North America. You can circumnavigate the 1,000 acres of Douglas firs, roses and lagoons on a popular 6½-mile seawall path.
The park took a clobbering in late 2006 when a massive storm blew through. We saw plenty of tree damage nearly a year later.
Our legs took a similar clobbering the next day when we subjected them to what locals refer to as "Mother Nature's Stairmaster." The Grouse Grind is a steep, 1.8-mile uphill trek through the forest that's guaranteed to kick every one of your sweat glands into overdrive.
Roughly 110,000 hikers "do the Grind" every year, climbing 2,800 feet -- more than 1½ times the height of the Sears Tower. Most people finish in less than two hours; some freak of nature reportedly did it in just over 26 minutes.
Grouse Mountain is in North Vancouver, a 15-minute drive from downtown or accessible by public transportation. If you don't feel like legging it to the summit, you can take an aerial tram. But that's not very Olympic, is it?
With so many parks, paths and smoothie-drinking, yoga-mat-toting residents, Vancouver felt like the epitome of healthy living. But it is a big city. And like all big cities, it has a seedy underbelly. We came across it one night while making our way from Chinatown to the touristy, cobblestone streets of the Gastown neighborhood.
Downtown Eastside, as it's called, was largely populated by folks who looked like they'd just come from an all-you-can-eat buffet -- of street drugs. Strung-out teens slumped against the walls of run-down buildings while prostitutes meandered along the sidewalks. I'm no pollyanna, but the scene was pretty jarring. Not scary as much as sad.
My guess is Vancouver officials will be hard at work between now and 2010 making sure Downtown Eastside looks quite different by the time the Olympic torch hits town. They won't want to have Skid Row a shotput's throw from high-profile Olympic venues such as Athletes Village, a sprawling waterfront complex that will house 2,100 Olympians and officials.
We kayaked past the unfinished Athletes Village during a near-perfect afternoon of paddling through False Creek. We'd rented a couple of kayaks on Granville Island and made our way up and down the placid waters, past floating Aquabus taxis and busy boat docks.
My husband wanted to capture the picturesque scene with, well, a picture. From his kayak, he carefully snapped a couple of shots of me smiling -- an expression that changed dramatically as I watched his kayak rock, tip and ultimately flip, dumping him into the drink.
Before I could figure out whether I should jump in or stay put, he popped to the surface, uttering words that would've resulted in some stiff sanctions by the Olympic Committee.
A couple of helpful Canadians on shore fished him out of the chilly water. ("Look what I caught: a 185-pound American!")
When we got back to the kayak rental shop, an employee let my soaking wet spouse pick out a free T-shirt as a consolation prize.
It wasn't a gold medal, but at least he had a dry shirt for the otherwise soggy walk back to the hotel.
Mind you, he would have much rather had his glasses. Those went MIA after his accidental eskimo roll in False Creek.
His specs probably ended up on some myopic fish -- who's using them to look at our Vancouver vacation pics.