Lynn Canyon Park

Yesterday we went off to North Vancouver to spend the afternoon at Lynn Canyon Park.

We had been there once during the fall two years ago and it was very pretty, but Vancouver during summer is a whole different thing and we were curious to see the Lynn Creek in a sunny day.

We reserved a Car2go and it was parked in front of a Peruvian Cafe, so we decided to try some Inca Cola. With our tutti-frutti chewing gum flavoured soda in hands, we drove off to North Van.

We got in to the park at the wrong entrance (2011 was a long time ago!) but had a pleasant surprise! We didn't get to see the Indiana Jones kind of suspension bridge they have at the other park entrance, but we didn't had to share "our" area of the park with any other tourists either.

We walked down some narrower trails following the sound of water until we arrived at this crazy beautiful shallow and wide portion of the creek between a short waterfall and a small rapid.

The water was extremely cold and we couldn't have our feet underwater for more than a minute.

Unfortunately it was late in the afternoon and we wanted to go through the trails back while it was still light out, but we are definitively going back someday this summer early in the morning to perhaps risk a freezing swim.

Balcony

We have finally fixed our kind-of-a-balcony. Pau says it's a "back porch".
It's a bit of space we have outside of our back door, by the stairs that lead to the back alley. Each of us neighbours have a piece of land like this that sometimes get invaded by people coming up or down and ours has never been anything.
We had a nasty small couch that the previous tenant left behind resting there that got substituted by our own old couch after we got a new one for the living room. After we finally sold the couch we were left with an open storage space. There was my bike, Pau's bike and two abandoned bikes we found on the streets. We sold them one by one and in the end there was only my bike and garbage left over from our kitchen renovation. Once there were also some embarrassing bags filled with kitchen garbage that we forgot to take down and got attacked by racoons (up in the third floor!).

We have been dreaming about this for a while and with summer starting to show its face, we decided it was time to take action. We took the old countertop and other junk to the dump, tied the bike standing up, cleaned the infinite amount of black dust and spider webs that we've been gathering for all these years and off to IKEA.

We managed to fit everything (perhaps illegally) in the smart car from Car2go and drove home through a storm. When we got home the storm had already stopped so we did some easy IKEA carpentry work transforming our nasty old space into a great summer spot! It got so great that we're working from here right now, even if it's still a bit nippy out.

The next step is to get some string lights for the night time. We already bought a huge pack of tea candles on this trip to IKEA, but string lights look so nice and cozy and pretty...

I've been researching on which on to get. I really love the look of the globe lights at night, but Pau has a point, they don't look so good during the day.

We're leaning towards the japanese lanterns made with nylon instead of paper so they can stand the Vancouver drizzle and look good in the day and night time.

But I've seen so many other fun novelty or more expensive string lights online...

I like the mini street lanterns or the "cafe" lights with a metallic dish on top from here. And I like all of the caged string lights a lot as well.

Bamboo lights for a tiki look, or straight tiki lights.

From the fun novelties ones that I'm sure we won't get, there are thousands of great ones (including some penis lights)

But I would have the greatest fun with these grape ones, just to reenact this video over and over:

Flowers

How nice is it to revive a pretty almost dead bouquet found on the streets?