Vancouver and more

So, I'm in Portland, Oregon right now. Pretty fun.
I'll just kick off where I ended last time. Vancouver, July 20th, probably. After taking care of the car, Aarne's family took us to the Vancouver Aquarium, in Stanley Park. The recreated natural environments such as the rainforest are always rad. And the 4D cinema, with the wind, back-poking things and such stuff, of course. Dolphins, colourful frogs, sea cucumbers and belugas were among the creatures living in the aquarium. We had dinner in Gastown later, it's a more historic part of town.
On Thursday it was time to visit Vancouver Island, one of my dad's high school friend named Peter Wiles. The island is pretty big, I don't know how many hours it would take to ride from one end to the other. It's also supposed to be quite dangerous in the nature there, with many cougars and bears. Anyway, Pete lives in a cozy house in a village called Cumberland, near Courtenay, if that means anything to you. It used to be a mining town, and it's pretty run-down now. It even had a Chinatown back in the end of the 19. century. They stopped the mining in the 60's.
We visited a mountain there, which still had snow on it. Didn't sadly visit the top, because it was really cloudy there. We also went to a seaside restaurant/pub on that day, where you could see seals looking out of the water. Pete took us to Cathedral Grove on the next day, with really tall trees. One of the highlights in my opinion was a river with some waterfalls, I don't recall its name.
We returned to Vancouver by ferry on Sunday. A grill with the other Tork family and three games of croquet with Aarne and Anne's daughters Annika and Aliina. On Monday I woke up around 5:10 AM to go walk around in town before leaving for Portland. Aarne's work started at 6, so he took me to the SkyTrain station near the airport where he works. The SkyTrain is kind of like a subway, but the rails are often above the ground. I went to downtown and then to North Vancouver via the Seabus. It's a pleasant area (or city, as it officially is, part of the Greater Vancouver) on the edge of a mountain, so it's on a slope.
Later Anne took us over the border to Bellingham airport in Washington, where we rented a car. In the evening we arrived in Portland, which is said to be one of the most environmentally friendly cities in the world. My dad has a friend there too, Erik Teose, and we stayed at his place. We (+Erik's family) went to a Mongolian restaurant where you basically stuffed your bowls full of food and they cooked it, really good place with an interesting system. Next day (yesterday) we went out of town to see a few waterfalls. It took a while to walk up to them, but the view was great.
Today we left Portland and I am now in Crescent City, California (I started writing this blog post yesterday, didn't have much time, though). We saw a bit of Redwood National Park which has even bigger trees than Cathedral Grove on Vancouver Island. It's also the park where they filmed the Ewok planet for Star Wars. Anyway, I'm done for now.