Photos and a video about our departure from Vancouver on Air Canada.
Air Canada Lounge cuisine of soup with beer, Bloody Mary, Johnny Walker Black Label on rocks and sparkling rosé.
Our plane, showing snow still on Vancouver mountain on May 18.
Airline meal.
Final view of Canada.
This is a weird photo of our plane right over Diamond Head.
Returned home at 9:15PM. Walked 3641 steps.
Great night sleep. So anyway, our 33-day trip was wonderful.
We went to the Osaka Expo twice.- Amazingly enough, we won the lottery on both days, for we got to use their motor scooter each day. FREE!!! Four for four. The odds of this happening had to be 100 to one for this to occur.
We still walked a lot, for we had to park the scooter in certain locations, and walk to the pavilions. However, if we had had to walk where we went, my pedometer would have showed more than 20,000 steps, or more than 10 miles, each day.
The expo itself was like all of those I've been to in the past. Great architecture, international mix of cuisine, lot of general excitement and so forth.- Will I be able to get to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia for Expo 2030?
- Top candidates for 2035 appear to be Berlin, Cairo and Busan. Looks like Busan will again be disappointed, for there is a tendency to move these sites around the world, and the last European expo was Milan in 2015. Of course, I was there.
- We then caught the Oceania Riviera for a 19-day cruise from Yokohama to Vancouver.
- We toured Hakodate and Otaru/Sapporo.
- But then we got to the month of May, and the cruise entered cold and mostly wet weather. The seas, though, never got dangerous.
- The food was early on outstanding. Then the bane of long tours. The cuisine becomes cafeteria food. Made us appreciate what is served at 15 Craigside.
- Crossed the International Date Line on May 3, and had two May 3s, back to back.
- One meal featured an unagi bowl station, the best one dish they had on this cruise. There was also a sushi/sashimi bar.
- My May 4 posting was entitled, HOW THE USA GOT GREAT.
- 1789, the size of the USA was 864,746 square miles.
- We than mostly acquired, but also kind of stole, territories that got us up to 3,531,905 square miles, part of this being the Alaska purchase in 1867 for $7.2 million from Russia. James Polk was president for much of this period.
- Now I understand why Donald Trump wants to add Canada and Greenland, for doing so would more than double our land area to 8,226,286 square miles, making us the largest country in the world....to Russia's 6,601,668 square miles.
- A highlight was the Hudson Glacier.
- Incidentally, that blue area at the front of our ship was like our own private veranda, for this portion was open to passengers for only few hours that day only. Our stateroom was up front, so we could see both starboard and port sides all the time. If we ever again go on a cruise, we will attempt to get a similar cabin.
On May 13 I had an in-depth update on deep seabed mining, a controversial subject with potentially important international and resource implications. I once was an authority on the subject. Hawaii is virtually next door to the most promising site, the Clarion-Clipperton Fracture Zone.
- Then we finally arrived in Vancouver. Our hotel, the Marriott Pinnacle is a 5-minute walk from Canada Place, the fourth largest cruise port in the world. We took the Big Red Bus three times around Vancouver, and had three restaurant lunches. That's about all we did in five days. I'm at the stage where I enjoy doing nothing much. The lunches were really outstanding.
Today, went to my toe-nail cutting doctor, shopped at Marukai, and am looking forward to a comfortable life of security and comfort at 15 Craigside.
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