Note:  This is the 3rd of 16 posts about our 21-day trip that included a 17-day (16-night) cruise on the Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL) ship SPIRIT from Vancouver, British Columbia to Honolulu, Oahu.  This post consists of four (4) photos with captions and some narrative.  All photos were taken with a Google Pixel 6 Pro by me (Bruce).

TUESDAY 29 August 2023 — (T3) Exploring Vancouver, British Columbia (CA) for another full day

This was the third day of our trip and the second of two full days we allocated to explore the City of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.  We were suitably impressed with our explorations yesterday and were glad we at least allowed a second full day.  Today we … well, I don’t know exactly what we did today, but I know what we did not do; we did not take very many photos.  As I am working on this blog post almost exactly 5 months after the fact, we are trying to recall highlights of the day.

Based on the available photos, it appears that we mostly consumed food but (ABWR) we mostly explored the area around our hotel on foot as our hop-on/hop-off passes expired sometime later in the day yesterday.  We recall walking along a street with a lot of shopping and food establishments in low-rise buildings and discovered a nearby Breka Bakery location.  Based on the time stamps on the photos, we returned there sometime in the evening and bought some bakery treats to bring back to our hotel room.  We vaguely recall that the weather was overcast with intermittent rain, which would explain why we took so few photos, or at least why we walked the area near the  hotel and I did not take any photos with the SONY alpha 6400 as I did not want to get it wet.

We had an early afternoon dinner at the restaurant in the downtown Vancouver Coast Coal Harbor Hotel.  L-2-R in the photo:  lettuce wraps, avocado dip & chips, and some kind of taco-like things (I think).  ABIR, they were very delicious and probably (mostly) vegan.  (Maintaining a plant-based diet is challenging when traveling, especially on a cruise ship. Meat and poultry can always be avoided, but fish, seafood, and dairy become more of a challenge.)

The time stamp on this photo is 03:51 (3:51 AM) on 30 August 2023.  The date/time stamp is UTC, and the local time in Vancouver is UTC minus 8.  That means this photo was shot at 7:51 PM on the previous date, i.e., 29 August.   Shown is a chocolate layer cake that Linda selected at the Breka Bakery outlet walking distance from our hotel.

This is what I selected from Breka Bakery.  It’s a crumb-topped cakey-thingy.  I do recall that it was delicious.  Knife and fork shown for scale.

This is a photo of the outside of the lid for the fold-up box that my crumb-topped cakey-thingy came in.  The packaging was as beautiful as the desserts.  Breka has seven (7) locations in the greater Vancouver BC area, and all of them are open 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  It’s probably a good thing that we do have one of these near our home.  I think we discovered the one near our hotel while we were out exploring the area on foot, so that is apparently what we spent the day doing.

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