Words are inadequate

I keep meaning to reply to this... and now I see that you're planning to post part 2 soon, so I figured I'd better answer part 1!! I'm glad you had such a great trip! I adore Vancouver, for many of the same reasons you do, and I hope to live there someday. (I'd actually prefer to go back to Seattle, which I adore for all the same reasons, plus my parents, some friends, and Trader Joe's - but Vancouver at least has better access to all of those things than Toronto does. We both have very Canadian jobs now, so moving back to the US in the short-to-medium term would be a big decision.)

The mountains and water are the best. We've also noticed that Canadian customs officers (and other parts of Canadian bureaucracy, with the exception of the DMV which sucks exactly as much here as in any state I've lived in) are much nicer, friendlier, and generally more reasonable than their US counterparts. I'm glad you had the same experience, but sorry that you got delayed by US customs. I think they just feel the need to arbitrarily hassle a certain percentage of people so they can claim to be doing their due diligence to "keep us safe." Blah.

It's probably true that being on vacation there made Vancouver seem even better than it actually is... but it's a pretty great place either way. Expensive, though... I'm not sure how affordable it is to actually live in the nice, well-connected-by-transit core parts of the city. My company's headquarters is out in a suburb (Burnaby) which is definitely suburban, but it's a fairly easy SkyTrain ride (and at that point, the SkyTrain is actually up in the sky!) to downtown, so it's not undoable.