Lou's Birthday & A Trip To America
On Wednesday it was Lou's 27th birthday, the second one she has celebrated in Vancouver. In the morning, after opening her pressies she did a video chat with her family and then around midday we made our way to Stanley Park to visit the Vancouver Aquarium. We'd been to the aquarium in 2005 but had not visited it since we moved here permanently. It was ok but I have to say it wasn't as good as we remembered and because it's the summer holidays it was absolutely packed full of people. We stayed for just over an hour but it was so crowded and hot in there we decided to leave after seeing as much as we could. We then took a walk along the sea wall and then went for "a couple" of drinks in a bar on the water front, it was so hot the frosted glasses and cool beer went down really well. Lou then moved on to the cocktails and we had a good laugh at some British holiday makers who provided us with much entertainment with their very vocal and incessant moaning!
In the evening we went to The Keg restaurant for a nice meal, it's become our favourite place to go to when we want really good food and it was probably about our 4th or 5th in the last year. Like Lou's birthday last year we had a lobster starter and then a nice steak each too. It was very good and the waiter did a good job at understanding my British accent which had become considerably slurred as the evening progressed!
The next day after allowing our heads to clear (more mine than anything!) we headed down to the USA so Lou could spend some of the money she'd received for her birthday. Apart from the time we flag-polled in June it was the first time we'd properly driven down to the states. The border is only an hour away from home but it takes about 90 minutes to get through as there's aways a considerable line up if you go at peak times. With Lou having a British passport we also needed to go inside their office so she could get photographed, finger printed and pay for a Visa waiver (only $6 USD). In total it still only took about 2.5 hours to get to Bellingham though and coming back home was even quicker. Once we got to Bellingham the fun began for Lou, I volunteered to be the bag boy and Lou enjoyed buying lots of new clothes! The prices in America are so much cheaper than Canada it was definitely worth it. A lot of things were 50% cheaper and some things even a 1/3 of the price in BC, Lou definitely got better value for her money down there. Even after paying double tax (Washington tax and BC HST upon returning) everything still worked out far cheaper than buying it at home! We didn't take too many photos as most of the time we were just inside shops but we had a good day down there. Lou's Visa waiver is good for another 90 days so I'm sure we'll be making a few more trips in the next couple months.
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