Seeing Vancouver From Above

Re-establishing the Alpine Baseline: 2025

Last year, Jay and I finally broke a five-year hiatus of Grouse Mountain. The hook was a local residents' promotion for a free gondola ride, which ultimately ballooned into four separate ascents in 2025. Our first run on August 6th was foggy and cool; a solid 5°C drop from the city. We checked on the resident grizzlies, Grinder and Coola, but the skyline views were entirely socked in. Because of the gloom, the mountain threw us a makeup day on August 14th. Naturally, it was even wetter and colder. The bears stayed hidden, but the local deer were out in force. Even with the damp, we realized how much we liked having a 1,231-metre peak sitting right on our transit line.

Since the commute was so easy, we bit on an email offer for discounted senior annual passes. Three trips break even, so the math was simple. The pass paid off on August 24th, finally delivering a 29°C day with the clear blue skies we'd been hunting for. Plus, we closed out the season on October 5th. A distraction at the cruise terminal inspecting the Le Commandant Charcot ice-breaker cost us the last free shuttle of the season, but we made it up to the peak by transit for a pre-hibernation goodbye to the bears and a rare lunch in the chalet.

Today's Ascent: July 5, 2026

Today, the forecast showed a patch of blue, so we put those passes back to work.  They will expire next month.  We hit the SkyTrain at 9:40 am, easily catching the 10:40 free shuttle at Canada Place. Instead of the usual transit vehicle, a massive, dedicated tourist coach hauled us up to the gondolas. We’re basically old pros at the logistics now. Up top, we noticed a display "Grouse Gravity Coaster." It’s a new 1.4-kilometre track weaving through the trees where riders control their own brakes, dropping 90 meters at up to 45 km/h. At $29 for two minutes of gravity, it’s strictly for the adrenaline tourists. We stuck to the free chairlift.  The track itself was not in view, but we might let natural forces of nature work in our favour later this summer.  We'll see.

Grinder and Coola were dead asleep when we arrived. They've been up here for 25 years, so I suppose they've earned a nap. We left them to it and rode the lift to the peak. By the time we finished taking in the city views and breathing the thin air, the bears were awake and working the crowd.

We ended up out of sync with the return shuttle, so we just grabbed a public bus down to Lonsdale Quay and rode the SeaBus across the Burrard Inlet. Because it dropped us right at Waterfront Station, we skipped buying lunch, hopped the SkyTrain, and ate at home in New West by 2:50 pm. From the misty freebies of last summer to today's streamlined transit loop, Grouse Mountain remains an incredibly efficient backyard escape.  Ultimately, the true peak experience has nothing to do with the altitude and everything to do with successfully exploiting a senior discount to find a quarter-century-old bear taking a nap.

The First Saturday in July

When there are no time clocks left to dictate our existence, a Saturday morning bleeds into the rest of the week with comfortable predictability. The weekend ceases to be an escape from work and simply becomes another day to manage the household. Naturally, this meant a requisite morning trip to the Superstore to secure our groceries.

The mundane routine quickly gave way to international sports drama. We did not actually watch the FIFA match, but we kept checking the updates as Canada lost to Morocco down in Houston. There is a specific, ironic interest in seeing our home country eliminated from the tournament by the very nation we just spent the entirety of June exploring. My souvenir bucket hat has officially transitioned from a fond travel memento into a slightly conflicted piece of apparel.

Fortunately, the evening was thoroughly salvaged in the kitchen. Jay took a rather basic flatbread acquired on our morning grocery run and elevated it entirely. He augmented it with his own ingredients to transform a simple carb into a pizza-like triumph. The apartment still smells absolutely incredible.

In the end, a Saturday that started with a routine grocery run evolved into a day of theoretical sports grief and very real culinary success. Granted, calling it "grief" is a stretch; we had zero financial stake in the outcome, our patriotism is not tethered to a scoreboard, and our overall interest in soccer peaked at around the moment of the hat's purchase ten days ago.

At the Other End of Downtown

I walked down Columbia Street this morning to check the thrift shop inventory. The trip proved successful; I returned via the SkyTrain with a colourful, short-sleeved summer shirt to handle the coming seasonal heat.  On the way out of the shop, I stopped to take a photo of our part of New Westminster. The view, not far from the corner of Begbie and Columbia, presents a jarring contrast in architecture.

 

On the far right stands the Westminster Trust Building at 713 Columbia. Constructed between 1911 and 1912, it was the city’s first skyscraper. The Chicago School design features cream-coloured terra cotta and red brick. The pre-war economy was booming enough that the developers added two extra floors to the original six-story plan before breaking ground. It originally offered steam heating, a fireproof steel vault, and electric elevators! The penthouse served as the Westminster Club for nearly a century before closing its doors around 2013.

Standing right next to that early twentieth-century masonry is the Anvil Centre at 777 Columbia. Jay and I have lived along this section of the Fraser River long enough to remember what sat there previously: a sloped, faded section of retail on the old Golden Mile. Completed in the fall of 2014, the new building relies heavily on glass, steel, and limestone. It contains an 84,000-square-foot civic podium that supports a nine-storey, 137,000-square-foot office tower. The architects included some black brick as a token nod to the older red brick next door. It now holds a 364-seat theatre and the local museum; everything radiates from a large 60-foot open atrium.

A full century of civic ambition sits awkwardly but proudly in this single shot. You can appreciate the modern glass and the historic terra cotta all at once, provided you do not get hit by traffic while standing in the middle of the street to get a decent photo.

"Turn off the Living Room Lights"

It is hard to believe it has been a full eight years since that first unassuming Google Home Mini sneaked onto the living room table.  In 2018, that little device suckered me into an entire ecosystem. It has been a really long time since I last touched a physical switch for most of our lighting, or actually had to turn on the computer printer by hand. I'm used to shouting at things in my apartment now.

Today, a new piece of hardware arrived. I ordered the new 2026 Google Home Speaker simply because the old Google Assistant has finally been axed. I've been using Gemini on the old devices since getting back from our winter. It has been a fantastic improvement. The AI integration into my home has been phenomenally useful and, unlike others, I encountered no problems at all. Today's packaging proudly states this speaker is "built for Gemini," which is a bit goofy considering all my older devices received the exact same software update anyway.  The new hardware tech inside the speaker is supposed to be more robust for AI implementation.

What was truly absurd was the shipping reality. Because I needed to use store credits directly, I was locked into the Google Canada Store and could not just make the pre-order through Amazon or Best Buy. My device shipped from Ontario and took more than a week to crawl here via UPS. To add insult to injury, UPS promised delivery for the afternoon of June 30. So, we rushed around doing all our errands in the morning to ensure I was anchored to the apartment for my 12:30 to 4:30 pm window. Naturally, I returned to find one of those little slips, written at 11:16 am, saying the driver was sorry he'd missed me! Grrr!  And because yesterday was our national birthday celebration, the box sat hostage. I finally got to drive to the UPS Store at Columbia Square this morning just to retrieve the small box myself. Google should consider the time it takes to get to Vancouver via UPS a huge failure for a 2026 order.  How about a little west-coast warehousing, please?

The list of complaints about this new device is growing online, and I agree wholeheartedly with the first point. It has a power cord that runs permanently right into the unit. So much for cable management! Even worse, standard troubleshooting by unplugging it now means crawling under the furniture to yank the brick from the wall, rather than just disconnecting the cable from the back of the speaker. Of course, this hardware rollout is perfectly timed with a massive slowdown in Google Home server-side operations today. I am occasionally encountering half-minute delays just trying to get the new speaker to acknowledge a command. It is obvious the stalled pre-order schedule was supposed to buy them time to work out details that clearly have not been completely ironed out.

Despite the absurd shipping saga, the captive power cord, and the server hiccups, the sound quality is a slight improvement over the eight-year-old Mini. Plus, the little LED ring that glows underneath the speaker almost makes up for everything else. The rainbow glow of colours indicates if it is listening, thinking, or answering. So, after a week of waiting and the realization I might have to crawl under furniture to reset it, at least I am aesthetically quite happy with the look of the demure 2026 speaker!

Our 30th Canada Day

In front of the 2010 Winter Olympics torch near the Vancouver Waterfront. 

On our very first Canada Day, Jay and I were still living out of a hotel as we hadn't rented an apartment yet. We were intensely concentrated on that task, having just arrived from Dubai via Hong Kong a few days prior on June 26, 1996. It is rather hard to comprehend that thirty years have passed so successfully and quickly since those initial, unsettled days.

That first, rather unplanned, experience marked the 129th celebration of Canada's birthday, and here we are today celebrating the 159th. More than forty percent of our lives and seventy percent of our time together has been anchored in Vancouver.

Heading to the waterfront on the SkyTrain today was a delightful way to say thanks to the country that has provided so much to us. 

Happy Canada Day!

Tomorrow's Canada Day!

I am actually a bit embarrassed to have to spell this out. It just dawned on me that some of you, specifically those unfortunate enough to not find themselves living in Canada, might have missed the memo. Some may wonder why the entire upper portion of North America is draped in red and white this week, eh? Sorry about that.

 

For folks south of the 49th parallel, who may be unaware, July 1st is Canada Day. Tomorrow is essentially our equivalent of the Fourth of July, just without the musket fire, the dramatic declarations, or ruining perfectly good tea by throwing it into a harbor.

While your national mythos is built on a violent, chaotic kerfuffle, ours is built on the triumph of polite, rather boring, administrative consensus. On tomorrow's date in 1867, the colonies of Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and the Province of Canada (which immediately, and politely, split itself into Ontario and Quebec) simply got together on the chesterfield, drafted some paperwork, and quietly asked London if they could consolidate into a single Dominion. London essentially said, "Sure, sounds good," and we said, "Thank you very much."

We still celebrate with the standard North American protocol, but buy our two-four of beer with a pocketful of loonies and toonies.  We do fire up the barbecue, and set off evening fireworks too. We just try to make sure the explosions aren't too loud, so as not to bother the neighbors. Sorry again for interrupting the preparations for your 4th with this bit of trivia.

An Accidental Hooligan

I am not exactly a devoted follower of the FIFA World Cup; in fact, my knowledge of the tournament is exceptionally limited. However, a completely pragmatic decision to spend my final, unexchangeable dirhams at the Casablanca airport last week has inadvertently turned me into a partisan football supporter.

 

I purchased this branded bucket hat strictly as a financial transaction to avoid dragging useless currency back to New Westminster. Yet, serendipity has intervened. Tonight, Morocco faces the Netherlands in the knockout stage. If my newly adopted Atlas Lions manage to win, their next opponent will be Canada.

It seems that a simple airport impulse buy has left me entirely prepared to sit on the balcony and face a profound crisis of national loyalty over a sport I rarely watch. The true winner of this tournament might just be my effort to avoid foreign exchange fees.

Full Circle in the Tracking Wars

I am a total sucker for gadgets. On occasion, this trait has had me jumping into tech trends a bit too early. Six years ago, back in July of 2020, I polled a few Facebook friends about Bluetooth trackers. The response was a resounding silence, but I could not resist. I ended up buying a four-pack of Tile Mates via Amazon Canada. At the time, my concept of trackers was a vague jumble of GPS devices and FBI vans, but I quickly learned they were just little speakers you could summon from an app. They proved their worth a year later during quarantine when that high-pitched little tune guided me to my car keys buried deep inside a backpack that had travelled with us all winter.  The initial thrill faded and was replaced by a distinct logistical annoyance. Keeping tabs on the tiny fleet of Tiles meant managing a miniature battery supply chain. The biggest hassle was keeping multiple coin-cell batteries replaced across different form factors. 

Then, Apple arrived in 2021 and hijacked the entire market with the AirTag. They utilized their massive network of a billion iPhones and left Tile's community network completely irrelevant. Google was paralyzingly slow to counter. They chose to delay their own Find My Device network until 2024 to ensure cross-platform safety protocols were in place. Because I always own Google phones, my early Tile purchases were marooned in a tech landscape dominated by Apple.

My new purchase today feels like hitting the sweet spot at exactly the right time. Now that Google’s global tracking network is mature, I can finally use the ecosystem natively from my phone. I have officially ordered a yellow Chipolo LOOP, which completely solves my old Tile grievances with its USB-C rechargeable battery. No more hunting down tiny watch batteries or tossing plastic squares into the landfill. Furthermore, navigating a mixed-hardware household is a delicate balance. I am currently running the new Pixel 10 Pro, while Jay is on a Pixel 7 Pro. If I had chased the newer Motorola Moto Tags for their fancy directional tracking, Jay’s phone would be locked out of the feature entirely. In the end, my tracking journey has gone from premature plastic squares to a democratic, rechargeable powerhouse. The Chipolo LOOP treats both of our Pixels as equals with its deafening 125-decibel siren; let us just hope it is loud enough to find our keys without triggering a noise complaint from the neighbours.