Our Labor Day Weekend trip to British Columbia was rounded out with two full days in Vancouver. If you missed my previous post, I wrote about our fun day trip to Victoria and Butchart Gardens.
This was my second trip to Vancouver. My first having taken place over 8 years ago. Since it was so long ago, I did not mind at all visiting some spots that I had been to before.
Here are my favorites from our short trip to Vancouver!
Granville Island
One of my favorite things to do in other cities is visit their public markets. I love Reading Terminal Market in Philly, Grand Central Market in LA and Chelsea Market in NYC. Granville Island Public Market has the same kind of buzzing energy that I find so exciting and there is beautiful food as far as the eye can see.
If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter, you know that I was traveling in British Columbia, Canada over Labor Day weekend. Did you know Canada also celebrates Labor Day over the same long weekend? I did not!
On our first full day in BC, we took a day trip with Landsea Tours to Victoria and Butchart Gardens from Vancouver. Now, I am not a huge fan of bus tours, but when you are short on time and transportation and logistics are complicated, I feel that turning to a guided bus tour is the way to go. Getting to Victoria from Vancouver is quite a trek and since we did not want to rent cars, booking a bus tour was definitely the right way to do it for us!
Victoria is located on Vancouver Island, which is accessible only by ferry or plane. We were picked up from a nearby hotel at 8 am. Then we took a 40 minute drive to the BC Ferries Terminal in Tsawwassen. We had to wait for about an hour since the ferries only depart once an hour.
Ferry Ride on the Coastal Celebration
Once it was time for our ferry to depart, our tour bus drove directly onto the ferry named the Coastal Celebration. Once the bus was safely parked, we were able to disembark the bus and explore the ferry's amenities for the majority of the 90 minute ferry ride.
If you didn't notice I have been putting off writing about the TBEX Conference itself. It is so much easier to write about the things I did rather than try to distill what I learned into a blog post.
The Venue: TBEX was held at the Metro Toronto Convention Center South Building. I noticed that if you needed some time for a breather, it was very easy to find a spot to get away from everything. And there were tons of places to sit!
The Keynotes: I attended two keynotes. The first was given by Trey Ratcliff from Stuck in Customs. He shared stories and his beautiful photographs. The second was from Dave and Deb from The Planet D, where they spoke about the current state of travel blogging. While some complain that you don't really learn much from keynotes, which I think is true, it is my belief that keynotes serve more of an inspirational (aspirational) purpose. As in, one day I aspire to get paid for what I do.
Keynote from Trey Ratcliff, Stuck in Customs
Speed Dating and Access to Brands, DMOs and Destinations: I'm a small fry but I had a chance to network with and pitch to DMOs, destinations and brands in both informal and formal settings. While I only had one speed dating appointment, I really learned a lot from preparing for it and going through the experience.
TBEX Speed Dating
The Swag: Who doesn't love getting free stuff? The best things I received were a solar charger from American Express SPG and Gogo Inflight sessions. Also, my current favorite pen was from Google.
Lowlights
Overcrowded Sessions: I picked out a number of sessions to attend before the conference started but was unable to attend any of them. The breakout rooms were way too small. I even tried to attend second and third choice sessions to no avail. Good thing lots of the sessions slides are available online for me to review.
Snobbery: I am not a professional blogger although I wish I could be. I just don't make enough/anything from writing my blog. I realize that there are some people who are able to do it, but that doesn't mean there isn't room in the travel blogging sphere for both professionals and non-professionals. That is why it really irks me to hear and see the snobbery put out there by some professional travel bloggers.
After TBEX was over, I had almost all of Monday to further explore Toronto. The weather was amazing!
Since CN Tower was so close to us, we decided to go to the top and enjoy the view. Unfortunately, it seemed that every school kid in Toronto was having a field trip that day. It was loud and they were running amuck, so we went it and out pretty quickly.
The views were gorgeous though!
CN Tower has a section with a glass floor. Scary, huh? All of the school kids were jumping and sitting on it so I could barely get a photo.
After we elbowed our way out of CN Tower, we passed by Rogers Centre and visited the Blue Jays Shop.
It soon turned into lunch time, so we met up with a friend for lunch in Kensington Market, which I wrote about in my food post. We had some time left before Rebecca had to head to the airport, so we walked around Kensington Market. There are so many interesting boutiques and restaurants, plus a bunch of cool street art.
I said good-bye to my sister, and then headed to the Art Gallery of Ontario, where I planned to spend my afternoon. Only thing was that it is closed on Mondays! Fail!
Instead, I walked around Chinatown and took a long leisurely stroll back to the Downtown Core.
I decided to spend the rest of my day at a coffeeshop to catch up on email and blogging before it was time to bid Toronto adieu! Disclosure: I received complimentary entry to CN Tower from Tourism Toronto and swag from assorted TBEX sponsors. All opinions are my own. Read my full disclosure here.
During my stay in Toronto, I only had a few opportunities to try out the local eats. After our Toronto Photo Walk, Rebecca (big sister/Cruising Goddess) and I stopped for lunch at Mother's Dumplings to try their handmade dumplings. What else?
The two of us shared orders of xiao long bao (pork dumplings), scallion pancakes and steamed shrimp dumplings. I thought the first two items were excellent, but the skin of the shrimp dumplings seemed dry to me. This was more than enough food for the both of us, and we left stuffed!
Later in the day, Tourism Toronto hosted the TBEX Opening Night Party at the beautiful Roy Thomson Hall.
Toronto is well-known for being an extremely diverse city with 50 percent of its inhabitants being foreign-born. This diversity was showcased during the Opening Night Party. There were different food stations set up around the Hall, each representing a different ethnic neighborhood in Toronto. Chinatown was one of the "neighborhoods" that I stopped by to get myself a cute take-out box of lo mein and dim sum!
A highlight of the evening was Ninutik Maple's presence! They were on hand to create some yummy treats. Maple syrup was ladled onto a bed of ice to chill and then a cube of cheese was wrapped in the frozen maple syrup. Below is a video of the process.
There was also a pretty dessert table with lots of little sweet delights to sample.
And there was even a gummy bear carving station. Now, that is something I had never seen before!
At the end of the evening, we were treated to a surprise performance by Canadian musician, Serena Ryder.
The next night, we attended Expedia's Viewing Party, which was held at Shopsy's on Centre Island. Since Centre Island is an island, we had to take a short 15-minute ferry ride to the venue. This gave us some awesome views of the Toronto waterfront!
We got lots of fun foods during the event from build your own burgers to sno-cones and cotton candy.
On the ferry ride back to Toronto, we also got to see the skyline all lite up. I love the different reflections of color on the water. So pretty!
There wasn't an evening event on Sunday, so that gave us another chance to try out some local restaurants. We decided on Japanese since we had been eating some pretty heavy meals. We found Yuzu No Hana to be very close to our hotel as well as highly rated on Yelp.
Rebecca and I shared the tuna avocado tartare. I also ordered a salmon handroll, yellowtail nigiri and tenzaru soba. Yes, that was a lot of food, but so yummy!
I also had the not-so-brilliant idea that we couldn't leave Toronto without having tried poutine. Since Smoke's Poutinerie was only a couple of doors away, I convinced sister to make one last stop for the evening with me. If you don't know what poutine is, it is a Canadian dish, originating from Quebec, of french fries topped with gravy and cheese curds. I had to try it but found it super salty and not very appetizing.
On our last day in Toronto, we met up with Professor Wong, one of my oldest friends/former neighbor/high school buddy and current Toronto resident. We had lunch at Wanda's Pie in the Sky in Kensington Market.
I had the brie and nut pate sandwich, which I thought looked and tasted like meat loaf. Interesting, no? We also shared a terribly cute rhubarb pie!
You might think I'm crazy for saying this after looking at everything I ate, but I wish I could have tried more food and explored more of the neighborhoods! Next time!
Prior to the start of the recent TBEX conference, I had the chance to go on what turned out to be a very strange Photo Walk of Toronto. I found it to be strange because the group was relatively large at about 25 participants, and the Photo Walk leader didn't tell us anything about what we were shooting. Even now, I have no idea what half of the sights we visited are called! The tour was also supposed to include tips and tricks for taking photos, but I felt that if you didn't have a DSLR, than none of the information that was given was relevant to you. There must be tips that point-and-shoot users can incorporate, right?
I did get some good photos out of the walk even if I didn't get much information about taking photos or about Toronto itself. I tried to Google search some of the buildings to see if I could identify any of them and had some luck. If you can identify any of them, please tell me in the comments section and I will be very grateful!
Here is one of the buildings that I was able to identify! This is the main hall of Union Station.
One thing that came up quite often during my trip planning was the fact that Toronto is undergoing a ton of construction. They weren't kidding. There was construction everywhere!
With all of the new construction sites around, there is bound to be more contrasting structures sharing the same cityscape in the future. The Clock Tower of Toronto's Old City Hall is one such structure from the past.
CN Tower is sort of the iconic landmark in Toronto's skyline. It was once the tallest structure in the world. Whenever I wasn't sure if I was heading in the right direction, I just needed to look up and see where CN Tower was to get my bearings again.
I loved the interior of Brookfield Place because of all of the natural light that it brings in. The lines are also quite beautiful.
Architecture wasn't the only thing I noticed on my photo walk. There were also everyday pieces of Toronto living that I was able to capture, such as their BIXI bike shares.
And their public transportation system, which includes red streetcars like this.
And their colorful post boxes.
I thought the Photo Walk was pretty much a wash. I didn't feel like I got anything more out of it than I could have gotten had I just picked up a guidebook and led myself on a walking tour of Downtown.
Disclosure: I attended this photo walk free of charge as an attendee of TBEX. All opinions are my own. Read my full disclosure here.
In just a few days, I will be traveling to Toronto to attend my first travel blogging conference and my second blogging conference.
There are two main reasons why I am hoping to get more out of TBEX than I got out of BlogHer 2012.
It's much smaller. TBEX recently surpassed 1,000 registrants, making it the largest TBEX in history. In contrast, BlogHer 2012 was the largest BlogHer ever with 5,000 attendees. It's no wonder I felt lost in the crowd and lost in general.
It's more niche. While attendees will certainly have their own niches within the travel niche, we are all, at the most basic level, travel bloggers. BlogHer is a conference for women bloggers. With such a broad audience, what that seemed to be interpreted as was that women bloggers = mommy bloggers. No offense to mommy bloggers or companies wanting to work with mommy bloggers, but some women bloggers aren't mommies and if they are mommies, not all of them are mommy bloggers. I found that many of the people I met at BlogHer and the sessions/events I attended didn't align with what my blog is about. I am hoping the sessions and key notes at TBEX will be much more relevant to me and my blog. More importantly, I am hoping the people I meet will be individuals who I can relate to and can relate to my blog.
To prepare for my trip, I've been doing the usual research I do when visiting a new city, but I have also been utilizing content on TBEX's blog to get myself and my blog ready. Here are some of the posts that I have found most useful:
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