Welcome to America

One last tip from our excellent concierge led us to a bakery called Le Beau, for our coffee this morning. We found it in a very modern row of food centric shops--a cookbook store and a cheese shop caught my eye--tucked away away in an industrial area. A steady stream of people kept the young women behind the counter busy while we sat on stools at a communal table discussing the ways in which Lady Findhorn could spend her "excess" Canadian dollars at nearby Granville Island.

After helping myself to several tastes of the Belgian specialties on offer--waffles and something called Belgian Rice Pie among others--I still found room for an almond croissant and a caffelatte. It's probably just as well that I forgot to go back for a rice pie and a savory waffle with green onion and spinach....

After a tour around the Granville Island galleries and souvenir shops, we made our way south out of Vancouver and headed for the border and Bellingham where we will have dinner with fellow blippers Local Food Lover and Philpo. Any city surrounded by water is inevitably difficult to get in and out of. With all its bridges and suburban sprawl, Vancouver is no exception. I twisted myself around to take a picture of the Golden Ears bridge, an elegant cable suspension bridge. I posted my picture in my Blipfolio, but unfortunately it is in the "museum" category and I can't figure out how to move it to "city".

Despite OilMan's best laid plans for a speedy trip across the border, we were asked to "pull around under the canopy and step inside the building". Apparently the fact that we were traveling with "aliens" who had not yet gone through American customs necessitated this detour--a perfectly reasonable request, I suppose, but are the bulletproof vests and weaponry really necessary? Would it really threaten the security of the homeland if U.S. immigration officials were to crack as much as a single smile?