A weekend on the Lower Mainland

I recently spent a weekend on the Lower Mainland. I was most impressed with the new Canada Line portion of Metro Vancouver's light-rail transit system called SkyTrain. The Canada Line runs between Richmond and the Vancouver Waterfront station with a spur line to the Vancouver International Airport. The Canada Line was busy so it is evidently a hit with commuters. The only dissatisfaction I had with it is that the ticket system only allows you 1.5 hours to reach the last leg of your destination. I was traveling from Richmond to North Vancouver and back again and it took one hour in the morning just to get from Richmond to the Waterfront Station. Then I caught the SeaBus passenger-only ferry that runs from there to Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver and from there a bus to my final destination. I think I ultimately had about 15 minutes to spare by the time I reached the North Vancouver bus. I was lucky because there was a SeaBus already docked and almost ready to load when I arrived in the morning. The return trip in the afternoon was a little less stressful except that it was standing room only in the Canada Line car because it was the start of rush hour for commuters.

I wandered around Steveston a couple of times, a popular destination with local families and visitors from elsewhere in the Lower Mainland and beyond, and took some photos, a few of which I've posted on Flickr.

Here's one of them of a concrete and steel fishboat sculpture near the start of a waterfront walkway that leads to the Britannia Shipyard. The original is color but I enhanced it to look like black and white infrared film.