Few Hours in Vancouver

[BeachFamily1989]

We will be ending our cruise on the Norwegian Jewel in Vancouver.  Our plane home doesn't leave until 11:57 pm.  I have read about a lot of things to do in Vancouver but can anyone give some advice on what we can do in just a few hours.  I don't want to plan on traveling all over town. I heard there was a section right off of the cruise ship area? Is this true? Thank you!

[martincath]

10 hours ago, BeachFamily1989 said:

We will be ending our cruise on the Norwegian Jewel in Vancouver.  Our plane home doesn't leave until 11:57 pm.  I have read about a lot of things to do in Vancouver but can anyone give some advice on what we can do in just a few hours.  I don't want to plan on traveling all over town. I heard there was a section right off of the cruise ship area? Is this true? Thank you!

Your problem is that most of our tourist sites are walkable from the pier, or have a shuttle bus that leaves from right outside! So even if you discount the things you need to get in a vehicle to go visit you still have to cut a list of dozens of possiblities down to maybe 3 or so...

 

So I'll provide my standard answer - get everyone in your group (well, probably not the youngsters who don't read well yet!) to hit up TripAdvisor. Given your single day, you shouldn't need to dig beyond the Top Ten listings to figure out at least three that sound really good to you - compare everyone's lists and see where they overlap, negotiate a little (or just split up for part of the day, free city WiFi #VanWiFi enables messaging and maps even without a dataplan) to help firm up your short-tlist.

 

Then if you don't want to wait just fire up Google Maps; with the pier (Canada Place) as your starting point, you can easily find all your sites and how close they are on foot, by bike, by transit (full schedule datasets are provided to Google, they now power our official transit website so the data on G-maps literally is the same as on Translink) or by car (cabuberlyft). You can even check pricing on the latter, although in general if you don't leave the core it's pretty hard to get a cab fare into double digits.

 

Or you can come back and tap local expertise - sometimes it's not just absolute distances and directions, but e.g. time of day because of commuter traffic, so we might be able to suggest doing your top three in the most efficient order and putting you somewhere that you have have good food options at the appropriate times of day, that sort of thing, so even if you have pre-Googled yourself we might be able to add some extra value.

 

If still in doubt, just book the HOHO for the day and store your bags at or near the pier (e.g. Pan Pacific hotel inside the building, $10ea last year) - transpo between many popular sites, flexible schedule so you can get off for as long as you want, and a handy spiel about what you're seeing from the bus - and get off at the places it stops at that seem interesting.

 

While the last run is usually done by 6pm even in summer, that's good enough for your purposes as you'll want time to get some dinner and collect your bags before heading out to YVR (<30mins and <US$3pp by SkyTrain, not much longer by cab but about US$30 on the meter, Uber might save a couple of bucks) for about 10pm. You won't Preclear on your flight, CBP stop work at 8:30pm, so you only have bag drop and security which should both be quick at that time, so the official 3 hour preflight timeline really is a waste of time for redeyes.

[Clashed]

you can check your luggage at the Pan Pacific Hotel next to the cruise terminal

 

if you are ok with walking up to a mile you could visit any of these places

GasTown district, Joe Fortes restaurant, Robson Street area

 

you could take a public bus to Stanley Park or Granville Island

 

from Granville you can take a water taxi to YaleTown and then bus or train back downtown