Bargains in Vancouver B.C.

View of Vancouver's English Bay from the Burrard Street Bridge.

Half-price train tickets. Free food. A swanky hotel for $85 per night. How could this be? Everyone knows Canada's no longer a bargain for U.S. travelers. With the dollar and the loonie - Canada's one dollar coin - now worth about the same, it's easy to feel sticker shock on everything from museum entrances to eating out.

All the more reason to squeeze in a last-minute getaway to Vancouver before tourist season. An $80-$85 bid on Priceline.com for a four-star hotel this time of year almost always wins us a room at the Hyatt. I love small hotels and B and Bs, but, for this price, especially if we're traveling without a car, we like the Hyatt because it's next door to the Burrard Street station, handy for the SkyTrain, Vancouver's light rail, and many buses.

We traveled on Amtrak with two-for-one coupons (snagged last December during a promotion at PCC stores in Seattle), then happily ate breakfast for free in the bistro car, using $10 coupons Amtrak Cascades is making available through March 18. Tip: Print these out on the website before you go, or prepare to hunt around for a place to print them in Vancouver. One disadvantage of staying in a hotel such as the Hyatt is that it charges high prices for everything. Bottled water in the room was $5. Parking was $37 per day. Using the business center to print out two Bistro Bucks coupons would have cost us $7, so we went to a copy center downtown and paid $1.

Train food isn't what it used to be. I was impressed. We bought quiche and smoked salmon on the way up, and salads from Seattle's Gretchen's Shoebox Express on the way back.

I learned long ago that getting anywhere in Vancouver is easy without a car. The city has an an excellent public transportation system. We bought a $9 all-day transit pass at the SkyTrain station across from the Amtrak station, then used it to get to our hotel, and everywhere else, including Stanley Park, the Kitsilano neighborhood (for dinner at the Naam), even Richmond, Vancouver's little Hong Kong, the site of many of last year's Olympic events.

The Naam, Vancouver's best vegetarian restaurant.

On a clear day, though, there's no better way to explore Vancouver than on foot. We bundled up, and walked along the seawall that skirts English Bay to Granville Island over the Burrard Street bridge. It's possible to get to the island on little ferries, but walking across the bridge affords some unique city views. We happened to be in town for Granville Island's annual Winterruption Festival which meant there were some unique views from under the Granville Bridge as well.




Acrobats performing under the Granville Bridge during Winterruption

The Granville Island Public Market caters more to tourists than locals, but the crafts and gourmet treats are aways high-quality. We like to bring back fresh pasta from Duso's Italian Foods. It's always a hard choice, but this time we settled on three types of ravioli, one with sweet potato, another filled with asparagus and a third with feta and sun dried tomatoes. Dinner-sized portions for two cost about $5 each.

A snowy Sunday morning made for a very cozy breakfast at the Acacia Fillo Bar and Cafe on Denman, a few blocks from Robson. This is a little Bulgarian spot that gets rave reviews on Urban Spoon. We went twice, and next time, we'll go back for dinner. Below is their speciality - the Banitza - an Eastern European riff on a quiche, made with layers of fillo instead of dough, and stuffed with feta and spinach. This alone was worth the trip!

Fare Fight?

It takes luck to snag the kind of deal I found on Delta Air Lines for a spring flight to Istanbul. I owe it to Kayak.com, a "meta-search" travel site that scans hundreds of fares on airline and online-travel sites, then links customers to those sites for booking.

A routine morning check showed the flights I'd been tracking for weeks dropped from $1,400 to $989.

Within seconds, Kayak linked me to Delta's website and the itinerary I selected. I hit "Review and Purchase" and bought the tickets. An hour later, the price was back to $1,400.

Fares on other European flights plunged that day, then quickly disappeared, causing some to suspect a pricing error. Delta wouldn't say what happened, but I was more convinced than ever of the value of online-travel search sites to ferret out the best deals — fast.

Now a standoff with the airlines threatens to dilute the usefulness of these sites, or in some cases, cut them out entirely.

Find out more here in my Travel Wise column in The Seattle Times.

Portland's Collectible Neighborhoods

In the market for a vintage typewriter, a gluten-free pumpkin doughnut or a pair of toe socks for those rubber flip flops?

Add Sellwood-Westmoreland, a pair of neighborhoods three miles south of downtown on the east bank of the Willamette River, to your list of Portland, Oregon find 

Collectors know the area for its sprawling antique malls and shops operating out of century-old bungalows crammed with vintage glassware and costume jewelry.

But like some of Portland's other reborn residential business districts — Hawthorne, Alberta Street and Mississippi Avenue — Sellwood-Westmoreland has evolved into something more as young families have moved in, bringing with them a taste for fresh-roasted coffee, organic restaurants and a healthy lifestyle. 

Two miles long and a mile wide, the neighborhoods form a teardrop-shaped business district with parallel main drags, Southeast Milwaukie Avenue in Westmoreland and Southeast 13th Avenue in Sellwood, connected at Southeast Bybee Boulevard.


Hillside overlooks lead to wooded trails in the Oaks Bottom Wildlife Refuge, an urban wetlands area and park near the river. Nearby is the Oaks Park amusement park, built in 1905, and a three-mile segment of the Springwater Corridor, a paved biking/pedestrian trail that skirts the Willamette to downtown.

Considered attractive residential areas in the late 1800s when electric trains stopped on Sellwood's Southeast 13th Avenue, the neighborhoods declined after the Depression, as residents moved to other parts of Portland.

"It had been a lower rent area for quite a number of years," says Brent Heeb, the owner of two antique malls on Milwaukie Avenue.

"Then, about six or seven years ago, things started to change. It went from lower middle class to middle and upper class. The houses that used to sell for $30,000 were selling for $300,000, and that brought a whole new economic base to the neighborhood."

Replacing some of the antiques shops are new ventures such as Cravin' Raven, an organic, mostly gluten-free bakery opened a year ago by Cindy Sherman at 8339 S.E. 13th.

The former human-resources manager searched different neighborhoods for a year, then settled on Sellwood after her corner store space, a former antiques shop, showed up on Craigslist one morning.

"Being here is kind of like going back to the '50s," she says. "It's a very old-fashioned, kind of a nice, comfortable neighborhood."

One major draw is Columbia Sportswear's factory outlet store at 1323 S.E. Tacoma St., where I found winter ski jackets marked down from $140 to $39.98.

The other is food. Some of Portland's best restaurants are tucked away in its neighborhood business districts. Southeast 13th Avenue and Southeast Lexington Street in Sellwood is headquarters for a small collection of mobile food trucks serving quick, inexpensive lunches.

Drop by the bright red Curbside Grill, where Ray Koernig and Melanie Sandoval specialize in flame-grilled chicken sandwiches. Try the G-bird, made with thigh meat topped with Gorgonzola ($5.50).

A few doors away at Zenbu, Wes Kasubuchi works out of a silver Airstream, turning out Sichuan green beans, tofu balls or hand-rolled sushi ($3-$5). Canvas awnings draped above picnic tables provide shelter, but it was raining hard the day I stopped by, so I took my lunch next door to the Blue Kangaroo Coffee Roasters, and ordered a Cubano, a latte made with espresso infused with cinnamon and sugar.

Partners Flo Posadas and Cindy Wallace started out roasting beans in a hand-cranked popcorn popper one pound at a time, using a propane burner set up on their back patio.

They've since graduated to a German-made machine where they do small-batch specialty roasts in a backroom while customers relax out front in a cafe furnished with a leather sofa and stuffed chairs.

Around the neighborhood, storefronts and bungalows labeled with historical markers house a mix of restaurants, boutiques and antiques dealers.

Sock Dreams, a Portland online retailer, sells toe socks made in Taiwan and men's checkerboard crews in the former B.F. Smith house, built in 1892 at 8005 S.E. 13th.

Across the street, the Love Art Gallery displays work by 70 local artists. Metal sculptures of giraffes, horses and owls decorate the front yard of what was the Mordhorst House, built in 1908.

Two classy Italian restaurants, a Cena and Gino's, anchor opposite ends of 13th, but the best reason to make a visit to Sellwood stretch through dinner is the Jade Teahouse & Patisserie at 7912 S.E. 13th.

Four fat lemon grass tofu salad rolls ($5), billed as a "small plate," made a filling meal paired with a glass of local pinot gris, followed by a white chocolate macaroon made by the Laotian owner, who studied pastry-making in France.

On to Westmoreland

I started a morning of antiquing, hiking and bookstore browsing in Westmoreland with a trip back to the 1940s at Mocha Momma's Good Coffee Cafe, 6116 S.E. Milwaukie Ave.

Catch local poets, musicians and writers at "open mike" night Tuesdays, starting around 5 p.m. Otherwise stop in for a game of Scrabble by the faux fireplace and a plate of eggs or vegan "taters" served with toast and hummus.

Work it off with a walk through the nearby Oaks Bottom area, a 140-acre wetland that attracts hawks, quail, mallards and blue herons. Or spend a couple of hours wandering through the antique malls.

My favorite was the Dusty Tiger Mall of Collectibles, 6717 S.E. Milwaukie, with a 300-pound bronze tiger in the window. I passed on the 80-year-old foot scraper shaped like a dachshund, but was tempted by a set of seven etched cordial glasses for $15.

Sellwood is losing its neighborhood bookshop, the Looking Glass, tucked inside a red caboose at 7983 S.E. 13th. But Westmoreland still has Wallace Books, in a yellow bungalow at 7241 S.E. Milwaukie.

Surrounded by wooden shelves stacked with new and used titles, owner Julie Wallace keeps a wood fire burning near her desk on chilly days. There's one room set aside for cookbooks, another for mysteries and a wall for Pacific Northwest writers.

Wallace once worked at Portland's mega bookstore, Powell's City of Books.

"There are lot of people who just want to come into something a little smaller," she says.

She has only two rules.

"No computer books and no Harlequin romances."