10 Nights in: Canada 🇨🇦 

Hello everyone! I hope you’re all doing well.

Today’s blog post explains the reason my blog has been so vacant recently: I’ve been to Canada and back, and suffered a slight bout of jet lag. Just slightly.

The reason we ventured halfway across the world was because my cousin was getting married there, and a lovely wedding it was indeed.

Of course, the many places we saw and beautiful pictures I took had to be featured on my blog; you know how much I love to write about my travels! So, let’s get started.

Our holiday started off just slightly dramatically.  Airport, brekkie, wonderful… let’s go! Or not.

After sitting down on the plane, my mum approached me, my sister and my boyfriend with a worried look on her face.

Looking very concerned, her exact words were ‘Dad’s come across very unwell suddenly.’ Umm… what? Has he snuffed it or something? The look on her face was telling me exactly that.

Turns out that he had quickly developed food poisoning after my sister treated him to a smoked salmon and caviar breakfast for a nice (or not so nice) Father’s day present in the airport before setting off. Essentially, her gift had poisoned him.

After he’d had a slightly green episode, sweated profusely and sat down for a while, he felt a lot better, although our flight had now been delayed by an hour (soz everyone). The airline ended up refusing him to fly, and my poor Papa had to get off the plane.

About 10 seconds after his departure, my sister jumped up and nabbed his premium seat. Suspicious…?

Poor Dad. Anyway, off we went into the clouds and he enjoyed another day of sunshine in the UK heatwave (while we were flying towards rain!)

After a 9.5 hour flight, we finally arrived and stayed with my family just outside of Vancouver for the next couple of nights.

After staying with family for a few days, my cousins and I travelled to a town called Whistler, slap bang in the mountains and notoriously a ski resort, although there wasn’t much skiing going on when we visited as obviously, if you haven’t noticed, it’s currently Summer.

The drive there was also gorgeous – so many mountains and forests to look at on the way.

There were loads of cute and cosy bars in Whistler, and I’d definitely recommend it to anyone with a love of snow sports – it had the exact feel of a winter, chalet-girl type setting, you know? Except, well, it was nice and sunny, so not quite.

The day after Whistler, we had a loooong drive to Kelowna, where we were staying for 4 nights. The reason for this was… wedding timeeee!

The wedding itself was utterly gorgeous. I was super excited for the wedding because A) I haven’t been to one in absolutely years and B) well… it’s an excuse for a dress up and a piss up. Not that I need an excuse for either of those anyway.

The wedding was lovely and it was a fabulous day all round (despite the fact that I think I shed about 50 litres of sweat basking in the ridiculous heat.)

For the day after the wedding, we had been booked onto a Winery Tour, which was a pretty brave decision. However, we plowed through – Kelowna is one of Canada’s most popular wine regions, so I was keen to sample what they had to offer.

Let’s not beat around the bush – some of the wines I tried were revolting (red wines, I’m looking at you.) Who actually enjoys red wine apart from 40+ year old parents?

Luckily, though, most were lovely. One of the wineries even had baby goats, so I was a happy bunny. Another had a cute dog. Yep, good day.

After spending a few SWELTERING days in Kelowna, I was ready to curl up into a ball and perspire ’till death. Thankfully, that didn’t occur and we were off to spend our last 3 nights in an apartment in central Vancouver city.

Finally, we arrived at our Air B&B after being lectured by a very strict host not to wipe our shoes on his towels (damn, well there went my plans for the rest of the week.)

We were totally blown away by the view – we were in a super high-rise building and the sunset that night was B-E-A-utiful.

In all honesty, being up so high freaked me out a bit and I kept worrying that I’d somehow launch myself off the balcony at night. Funnily enough, that never happened.

Our first day in central Vancouver was a day of walking around and sightseeing.

One of my favourite places we visited was Stanley Park – an absolutely massive park in the city. I personally love wide, open green spaces, so this was ideal for me.

The next day (which was our last) was hands down my favourite day of the holiday.

First, we visited the Capilano Suspension Bridge. Essentially, a huge, long, thin bridge running over the Capilano River.

I unfortunately didn’t get any photo’s of the actual bridge itself; it was teeming with tourists and I wasn’t too keen on dropping my phone from the 70m height. However, it looks a little something like this:

After our trip to the bridge, we went up to Grouse Mountain. After coming to the realisation that we would probably decease if we did the hike up there (A.K.A the ‘Grouse Grind’) we caught the cable car instead.

The air up in the mountains was so cold and fresh. But, most excitingly, we saw bears!

I spent the whole time wanting to jump in there and give them all hugs. But then I remembered that brutal scene from The Revenant and I was quite alright.

To finish off our last day, we had a lovely, big family meal at a fab restaurant called The Sandbar on Granville Island.

As you can see, I had a very jam-packed 10 days in Canada. I’m now back home for a week until I am off to Kavos, so prepare yourself for another blog post alarmingly similar to my ‘7 Nights in Zante‘ post. Deary me… pray for my liver.

I hope you enjoyed today’s read! Talk soon.

Love, Dayna x