Tours in Bellingham

Since 2004, Snowbus’s fleet of 56 comfortable passenger coaches has shepherded skiers and snowboarders back and forth between Vancouver and Whistler Blackcomb. The route schedule allows mountaineers to hitch a ride out of Vancouver, schuss and slalom to their heart’s content at the world-renowned resort, and hop back aboard a bus for a movie and snack to accompanied their trip home. The service gives downhillers a way to circumvent the hassles of dealing with traffic and parking, and enables them to partake in après-ski revelry without fear of drinking and driving or drinking and cartwheeling back to Vancouver.

A city is like a walk-through history book with the stories scrawled along its streets and architecture. The sage-like guides of Hidden Dragon use their knowledge of that landscape to share the stories of Victoria. With that goal in mind, their menu of walking tours entices guests to join them through keystone locales that speak to the indigenous, British, and Chinese cultures that define the city, as well as the paranormal tales that comprise its folklore.

The Crown Victoria Native Island tour explores the indigenous people and British colonists that once inhabited the area. Guests walk past the historic Fairmont Empress Hotel situated beside the waters of Inner Harbour, totem poles, and the quaint historic shops of Old Town. The New World Old Chinatown tour inspired the Hidden Dragon name with journeys through the museums, courtyards, and concealed myths of Victoria’s Chinese community. For an alternative history of the region, guides divulge the stories of ghosts, witches, and demons found in the rooming houses and alleys of Dark Victoria.

Iconic buildings rise up on either side of tour groups as they trail guides who regale them with stories and historical insights. Traversing a total of 12 Victoria and Vancouver neighbourhoods, the Architectural Institute of British Columbia’s walking architecture tours illuminate pivotal and noteworthy structures throughout the city. In Victoria, explorers can ramble through Chinatown—the oldest Chinatown in the nation—or feel the waterfront breeze as it braids their hair on the famous harbour’s inner shores. Alternatively, Vancouver tourists can embed themselves in the city’s first neighbourhood, Strathcona, or investigate industrial expansion by roaming Yaletown.

The tours are just one of the many tools the Institute uses to raise architecture awareness. Established in 1920 to bring the profession's interest in line with the public, the institute doles out annual awards for outstanding architecture, displaying the winners in a public gallery. Meanwhile, their free architectural advice program for do-it-yourself homebuilders prevents common mishaps, such as building a second storey before building the first floor.

In 1985, as ends meet became harder to make, the Carleton family sold its cows and closed its nearly 30-year-old dairy farm. Not to be deterred, Mary Carleton began selling pumpkins and sweet corn from a roadside stand three years later. Today, the Carletons continue Mary's efforts by cultivating 60 acres of produce, including english peas, zucchini, and green and purple beans. Along with their own veggies, the Carletons stock their farm market with organic raw milk, grass-fed beef, local honey, and handmade pies.

After a summer spent selling their produce, the Carletons unwind with guests for nearly two months of autumnal fun starting in September. A corn maze with stalks more than 9-feet high snakes through a 4-acre field in a different shape each year. Come dusk, a cornfield eerily transforms into the haunted swamp, which dares guests aged 12 and up to creep through its creature-filled labyrinth. The pumpkin patch teems with various-sized pumpkins ripe for plucking, while the pumpkin cannon launches gourds into the air in hopes that one will transform into Cinderella's private jet. The fenced kids' area further entices youngsters with a zip swing, tube slides, and a rope maze, and the play area inside the barn intrigues them with a rope swing and hay maze.

Colleen Barrow has spent her entire lifetime seeking out and memorizing the coordinates of the most scenic sights dotting British Columbia's Southern Gulf Islands. Rather than trapping them in a photo album or enormous snow globe, the local explorer shares her finds with guests through ITT Wilson's Tours. By partnering with Wilson's Transportation, Barrow coordinates luxury bus tours to castles, lighthouses, botanical gardens, and wineries. With many of the tours, guests receive a midday meal such as rustic oven pizza served at an apple-orchard picnic site, or mutton legs aged to perfection in a castle's meat cellars.

Discovery West Aviation's commercially licensed pilots sail passengers through the air on charters, private lessons, and tours above urban and rural areas sprawling out toward the horizon. In private flight or commercially based lessons, flight instructors put students at the controls of Cessna C-172 or C-150 planes, explaining flight basics before teaching their protégés how to hide from gravity. During charters, professionals take the helm of the winged craft to soar over sites such as downtown Victoria with its watery inlets and architectural outcroppings or high above the banks of Campbell River with its snowy mountain peaks and views of eagles slicing through neighbouring clouds. Discovery West recently purchased Island Pacific Flight Academy, acquiring some of their fleet as well as a greater understanding of avian sign language.