Vancouver - Grouse Mountain

10 September

This morning we jumped in the car to go to Grouse Mountain. There is a gondola to take you to the top, or you can walk. The guide book said it was an hour and a half walk so we set off to walk up planing to take the gondola down. It was steep and slow going. At the 1/4 mark, we'd been going for about 35 minutes. We adjusted our ETA to 2 hours 10... We had lots of water and jelly snakes to munch on so just kept moving along. We passed quite a few people who were taking extra long rests and were passed by many people who were making an extra effort. The 1/2 way mark came and went and we were still going, then the 3/4 mark came and went. Zak and Emma were obviously tired but kept on going without any complaints and then we heard Zak going 'Woo hoo' from a little ahead - he had arrived at the top.
We had made it in 1 and half hours.

At the top there is an enclosure with a couple of Grizzly Bears which we got to see up close and they do a show with birds of prey and another with lumberjack stuff. We arrived at the bird show in time to see the very last bird, a Bald Eagle, swoop down the hill and then just fly off. The guys doing the show weren't happy about this. Apparently the eagle has a habit of making a single pass for the audience and then flying off down the hill so that they have to go and find it... We went back to catch the entire presentation a couple of hours later. It started late because they were still trying to recover the eagle!
The lumberjack show was largely a comedy with some demos of a couple of different techniques and lots of laughs.

We had planned to do a couple of things today but by the time we had taken the gondola down to the car park we switched the plan to pizza and ice creams for dinner. As we left the carpark in search of pizza, we saw the guys from the bird show with their radio tracker trying to find their Bald Eagle.

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