San Francisco

What an awesome place! People everywhere, nice weather, lots of stuff to see and lots of stuff to do. I could totally live here 🙂 Although I suspect the cost of living would be astronomical unless you lived way out in the wop wops.

Me (Ryan Hellyer) on the steepest street in San Francisco

There’s some seriously steep hills in San Francisco. The photo above is of me standing on the steepest one. They’re still a little shy of the gradient of our mighty Baldwin St in Dunedin though.

Worlds Crookedest street

They do have the worlds crookedest street in San Francisco though. People have skated down it before, I considered trying, but there was too much traffic and surface was made up of horrible knobbly cobble stones.

Vancouver

Vancouver is a wonderful place I highly recommend visiting if you get the chance. The weather was awesome while I was there. Stanley Park is a huge park area right beside the city center which I skated around while there. I hope to go back to Vancouver some day, might even consider getting a job there if I can.

Panorama of Vancouver

Beach on the side of Stanley Park in Vancouver

The shore on the side of Stanley Park in Vancouver

Seagull in Vancouver

I kept wondering what these crazily bright coloured but very common birds were in Vancouver. It turns out they’re just Seagulls! I felt a little silly when I found out 😛 This particular shot took about 500 attempts to get. Those darn birds move way to fast!

Seagull at Robson Square in Vancouver

Seattle

The weather was overcast. I had a nice meal at a restaurant recommended by Mike Boyle, tried the local brew (can’t remember what it was called and it tasted like dog poop anyway), visited the water front then headed off to the Space Needle. Seattle … been seen and done in three hours 🙂 I suspect it’s a nice place to live in, but not somewhere I’d recommend making a short visit to.

Seattle Space Needle

Drunk Greyhound drivers

We had a completely insane bus driver on the trip from Vancouver to Kamloops, BC at 4am in the morning. As we were coming into Kamloops he came on the radio with a slow drunken sounding voice saying he’d got a bit lost and was having trouble seeing straight! But that we’d be in Kamloops in a few minutes! It turned out he was just joking 😛 Joking about being drunk that is, not about reaching Kamloops. There wasn’t much there so I took this pic of a sign as a momento of my midnight visit before catching another bus to Jasper.

Kamloops sign