It's a sunny Wednesday in mid-June, a time of year many in western Canada will tell you is the best time to be there. I am in Vancouver, British Columbia's principal city, a return stay at the Listel Vancouver Hotel, one of my favorite hotels anywhere. http://www.listel-vancouver.com

I am not about to suggest you spend a night in each of the 54 rooms on the two "Gallery Floors" at the Listel Vancouver, but if you did, you would be privy to one of the most impressive art collections outside of a major museum or gallery. Many hotels around the world have examples of fine art in their lobbies and public rooms or prints and/or reproductions selected by interior decorators to match generally formulaic décor in guestrooms. The Listel Vancouver, however, has an arrangement with the city's prestigious Buschlen Mowatt Gallery to curate the public areas and guestrooms on the fourth and fifth floors. Consequently, the works of more than 30 local and internationally acclaimed artists grace rooms on these floors, a collection valued at more than a half-million dollars. Each of the rooms has information on the featured artist or artists. You almost get the impression you are staying in a spare bedroom at the artist's residence. And you might find yourself drawn to other rooms on the floor when the doors are open and housekeeping personnel are going about their business.

The Gallery Floors have had such a positive impact on guests over the past five years that the hotel recently partnered with the University of British Columbia's Museum of Anthropology to showcase distinctly British Columbian works, including artists of the region's First Nations: Musqueam, Tlingit and Kwakwaka'wakw. "Museum Floor" rooms include prints, ceramics, hand-forged ironworks, even native-carved cedar headboards and armoires, as well as textured window dressings and bed coverings.

The art collections are but one element of this lovely, independent hotel's cultural bent. Its O'Doul's Restaurant &Bar is known about town as the jazz spot, providing live music from the area's top performers, seven nights a week. Its "Books, Bed &Breakfast" package includes the morning meal and a gift certificate for Chapters, Canada's largest book retailer, while $5 of each reservation is donated to support local literacy campaigns.

I have relocated to the Pacific Palisades Hotel, (http://www.pacificpalisadeshotel.com) a suite on the 20th floor with a terrace opening onto the upper reaches of the skyline. But even from this higher vantage point, I am getting a sense of the verticality of this city: man in competition with God; glass, concrete and steel versus stone, foliage and snow cap. Pigeons soar about between roosts on ledges, airborne dots against rectangular windows and sliding doors, scribing stuttered lines upon this mammoth graph paper.

Directly across the street from the Listel, the Pacific Palisades keeps me centered in the thick of things. It has a wonderful restaurant called Zin, with a commendable menu, but my favorite aspect of the restaurant is the vest-pocket outdoor café, right on Robson Street, one of the city's main drags. So, I am sitting in the cool shade of the linden, which is looming over the sidewalk café. I am sucking on an iced cappuccino that looks so good I would take a picture, except I can't wait that long to drink it. Even the strawberry garnish slice is in trouble. And the froth of creamy-colored ice on top definitely does not have long to live. I feel like I am writing "Ode to an Iced Cap," but there is definitely something in Pacific Canada that brings out the purple poet in me. And this wonderful city, garnished in snow-capped mountains on an uncommonly warm, dry, cloudless day will do that to you; trust me it will do it.

CinCin Redux. (http://www.cincin.net/cincin) It is early evening and the weather is still making me love life. I'd eaten at this terrific nouvelle Italian restaurant a year-and-a-half before and had to do it again. Last time was mid-winter inside in the cozy warmth. This time it is perfect outdoors and I have a seat on the second floor veranda above Robson Street. The sun is now a reflected one, glancing off tall buildings further up the street. The eye-level foliage of the trees adds a cool element to the setting. I am sipping a dry, Grey Goose martini, straight up with a twist, gnoshing on fresh-baked breads spread with chopped olives bathed in their own oil. The waiter has just brought over an appetizer of salmon and capers on a hard cracker. "Try this," he suggests, as if I would pass on anything in this place. The salmon melts in my mouth; the cracker is to keep me from swooning. Maybe it's the martini. I'm thinking everyone should live like this, every day. Peace on earth would be assured. And they haven't even brought out the principal elements of the dinner: a mixed grill of beef, lamb and veal; with morel mushrooms, asparagus and mashed potatoes; accompanied by three British Columbia reds - two ounces each - a shiraz, cabernet franc and cabernet merlot.

Cocktails with Joanna Tsaparas, sales &marketing director of the Wedgewood Hotel (http://wedgewoodhotel.com) at the first-floor bar that opens onto the tree-lined street. This magnificent, smaller hotel (89 rooms) was purchased by Joanna's sister, Eleni Skalbania, in the mid-80s and totally refurbished under the watchful eye of the new owner, who had spent years at fine hotels in the Vancouver area. The Wedgewood caters to business people and exudes that sense of depth which derives from the innate dignity of a place, not superimposed upon it with overdone colossi of marble and overpowering furniture pieces. From top to bottom, you see the tasteful touch of the proprietor. All the rooms, from the standards to the suites, give a sense of space. Some open onto terraces, ideal for lounging or hosting a small cocktail party in the warm, dry sun of Vancouver summers.

After dinner, I meet up with Madeleine Wood, one of my favorite painters. We head for a place she is recommending to hear some music. She is a bit tentative. "It's . . . funky," she says. Seedy, some might call it. It is a dive, no question, in the best sense of that term. The paint job is . . . old. There are mismatched sofas against the wall by the front window, chairs and tables that would have been Martha Stewart rejects when they were new. A fan sweeps an arcing breeze across a segment of the room. The fan is too small to have even a negligible effect on the hot, weighty air.

A trio of musicians approach the stage: Fender guitar, acoustic bass, trumpet. From the first note of the trumpet, I know the music is going to work; that soft jazz a la 1960s California via Chet Baker, Gerry Mulligan, called "cool," for some reason. In terms of temperature, it is having about as much effect as the anemic fan. In terms of my temperament, it is glorious. The trumpeter actually reminds me of Chet Baker, a fair-skinned blond. During a break he allows as how Baker is one of his major influences. I hope not too major, since Baker was a renowned drug addict and died in a fall from a Paris hotel window at a very young age. But the young trumpeter owns his own music, no matter his influences. It is shooting directly into my nervous system, to beneficial effect. He returns a bit later to jam with the featured act, the Kevin House Music Review, keyboards, electric and acoustic guitars, sensual music. Maddy calls it road music. I see it as accompaniment to a soft rain on a veranda of a cabin in the Costa Rican rainforest, with the mosquitoes dancing against the screens to the rhythm of the music... to beneficial effect.

I awake to celebratory shouts coming from Robson Street below my window. The red letters on the clock radio read 6:38. Who would have anything to celebrate at this early hour? As my head clears, I remember that the World Cup soccer matches going on in Asia are ending in early morning North American time zones. I slit the blinds, see mostly young Asians, most in bright red shirts. Many are waving South Korean flags; others cheering, punching the air, parading down the street, cruising in a conga line of vehicles honking their horns. I click on the remote, find CNN, note from the streaming electronic ticker at the bottom of the screen that South Korea has just defeated favored Portugal 1-0 to advance to the second round in the tournament.

As I am seated for breakfast, fully an hour later, the celebration is continuing outside my window. There is some police presence, but it is pro forma. The crowd is joyous, but well-behaved. At one point a young woman from a small group of celebrants asks a cop to take their picture. He obliges, smilingly.

After breakfast, I meet up with Mika Ryan, of Tourism British Columbia (http://www.tourism.bc.ca). We have a lot to catch up on. She'd suggested we do that on a walk around Stanley Park. "You up for it?" she'd asked with a smile. "I can't think of a better place to have a conversation." We do the complete seven-mile loop, past the Royal Vancouver Yacht Club with its multi-million-dollar vessels, around points of land, alongside coves and lagoons. There are killer views of the city skyline, the Canadian Rockies and, most dramatically, the skyline imposed against the mountains. All about us, people are walking, jogging, biking, lying about on the too-green grass, reaffirming the better elements of living, just being in the moment. Ducks, geese, gulls, all of various species, float in the still waters of covelets, peck about the algae-covered rocks, waddle at the edges of mudflats, flap and coast in the lightest of breezes.

A wonderful way to enjoy this beautiful park while still holed up in the heart of the city is via a special sea-kayaking package offered by the Pacific Palisades Hotel, which starts with coffee and a newspaper, includes pickup at the hotel guided tours around the park's waterfront and breath-taking views of the city and the coastal mountains, then ends up with a glass of wine, followed by a relaxing session in the health club's Jacuzzi.

The next morning I meet Maddy for brunch in the Commercial Drive section on the east side of town. Away from the chi-chi side of the city, where I have been staying, this is an ethnically diverse neighborhood, really ethnically diverse. On the opposite side of the street from where we stop for fruit flavored smoothies at Juicy Lucy's, I note the following restaurants, shoulder-to-shoulder: Megabite Pizza, Sushi King, Viva Zapata, Il Caffe di Milano, Tandoori Palace, Cottage Restaurant and Bukowski's.

We hve brunch at Café Deux Soleil, for me veggie hash with two eggs over easy on two slabs of rye bread. No white glove service here. No regrets. I have chosen "hot" - versus basic, mild or moderate. They ain't kiddin'. I like it "hot," but I'm slurping the hot coffee to cool off, with the occasional sip of the banana and raspberry smoothie Maddy offers graciously. The food is delicious. You can always sell me eggs; however, I'm seldom enamoured of a mix of many vegetables, cubed into tiny morsels, sautéed in multiple herbs. I find the flavors fight and cancel each other. Not this time. Obviously, the chef has been working with this, perfecting its savoriness. The chef? Three guys in sneakers and rock 'n roll T-shirts are cooking up this stuff. Young women with tattoos and body-piercings are calling out the names of patrons and slinging orders.

A rose fills one canvas in the center of one of the display walls at the Portfolio Gallery, where Maddy is the featured painter. It is a lush trompe d'oeil, the fully bloomed flower owning the canvas, deep reds moving subtly into soft pinks, the edges of petals rim-lit in the lightest shades. The painting is one of a series Maddy has been painting, over several years now. I commissioned it the last time I was in Vancouver, a year-and-a-half before, when I first met this artist who has since become a dear friend.

I'm never sure how to react when I am in a position to evaluate the work of a friend. Really, what if it falls flat? Even if I try to be supportive, he or she will read the lack of approval in my voice, my body language. Fortunately, this is not an issue with Maddy's one-woman show. I am literally stunned into sotto voce comments about this latest work: flowers, fruit mostly, all of it tactile, exploding in color even when the coloring is mono- or di-chromatic. I have a different problem with Maddy's work. I am so sincerely engaged, connected, unambiguously impressed with each piece and the sheer totality of the opus, I can feel my praise may seem naïve, insincere. Then again, there is the unmistakable tone of voice, body language. For a sample of her work, visit online at: http://www.madeleinewood.com.

The rejuvenating Yaletown area is becoming the locus of upscale restaurants with innovative menus, tucked into former factories and warehouses, a few blocks up from the water. Blue Water Café &Raw Bar, one of the newer eateries in the neighborhood, specializes, not surprisingly, in seafood (http://www.bluewatercafe.net). The outdoor deck is an ideal place to sup, well into the light-filled evenings of long summer days in the Pacific Northwest; although the open, airy interior is equally attractive. And, inside, you can watch the restaurant's sushi chef do friendly battle with his hot-prep rival on the opposite side of the room.

If you and a guest have brought your appetites, start with the cold seafood "tower," a triple-decker affair of ice-bedded oysters, mussels, shrimp, calamari, smoked salmon, even a tasty, tangy jellyfish concoction. For entrée, I had smoked BC sablefish with leeks and black olive tapenade. The wine was a fruity, BC chardonnay. The dessert was a killer, warm Belgian chocolate cake with fresh mango sorbet and brandy snap basket.

Blue Water and CinCin are part of the Top Table (http://www.toptable.ca), a group of five restaurants and bars started by Jack Evrensel, a savvy entrepreneur who began with Araxi (named for his wife), in the then-little-known ski resort of Whistler Village. While the ski resort was prospering into one of the most highly regarded in North America, if not the world, the restaurant prospered with it and the owner expanded his operation into nearby Vancouver. The two I've eaten in were wonderful experiences.

For more information on Vancouver, contact: http://tourismvancouver.com. Discovering British Columbia is as easy as calling toll-free 1-800-HELLO BC (North America) or HELLO BC (435-5622) in Greater Vancouver. This reservation and information service puts you in touch with a team of professional travel experts who can provide free help and advice in planning or booking every stage of your getaway, from travel ideas and tips to booking your accommodations, tours, and transportation. You can also order your free copy of the BC Escapes(tm) Getaways Guide. To check out the Tourism British Columbia website, click: http://www.HelloBC.com.

Recently voted the best airline in North America by frequent flyers, Air Canada is by far the carrier with the most service to, from and throughout its homeland, offering 500 nonstops between the U.S. and Canada alone, including frequent service to and from Vancouver. For information and reservations, call: 888/247-2262 or visit online at: http://www.aircanada.ca

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