Fun Winter hikes in the greater Vancouver area

March 16, 2016

My Winter days in Vancouver often looked like this: getting up, hang on the couch, notice the time ticking by and not being able to move myself to leave the house. Before I knew it, it would be 1pm, which meant the day was over. It’d be dark in 3 hours, I couldn’t possibly leave for a hike! Might as well just watch an other episode of *insert favourite Netflix series of the moment*.

It got even worse when I checked out Instagram. I followed all these fabulous travel and adventure pages, so when I opened Instagram, my feed was filled with people hiking in amazing mountain views, rivers, majestic forests etc. It looked SO EPIC that all I wanted to do was crawl even deeper into my pile of pillows and ignore the fact that I live so close to amazing nature that I could literally leave the house and be in the middle of it in 30 minutes. 😛

I had to remind myself: “Tanja, you love to actually do these things. Go outside and enjoy a small hike. Who cares that the sun sets in 2 hours. You can still have a nice walk and some time to enjoy the scenery.”

Adventure time

Adventures don’t always have to be hours of intense hiking or activities that you could only dream about but are too hard to even start tackling. For me (and for Jelger) an adventure is to break free of staying inside and doing the same things over and over again, such as social media and/or Netflix. Do something just a little different, something exciting.

Adventure. Even the word itself is exciting. 🙂 Doesn’t it make you want to crawl out of your duvet cave? That’s what we did this Winter.

Here are our favourite places (so far) that we explored (and keep in mind we usually arrived about an hour before sunset): Rice Lake, Boundary Bay, Minnekhada Regional Park and Lighthouse Park in North Vancouver. Too far away? Pick one of Vancouver’s many beaches, such as Jericho Beach.

Even though I had to push myself, I always got back home inspired and excited. 🙂 How about you? Do you like a spontaneous mini trip? Does it have to be an epic hike? Or do you enjoy the smaller moments just like us?