Today’s Travel Tuesdays destination is  “not a place you can get to by a boat or a train. It’s far, far away. ..behind the moon, beyond the rain”…

Well, sort of. The fact that Chris and I had a chance to go to the Stanford Theatre in Palo Alto last month to see a screening of The Wizard of Oz on the big screen — well, that might have put the lyrics from a certain song from that movie into my head.  (Click here to view the movie clip of a song by Harold Arlen and lyrics by E.Y. Harburg, sung by Judy Garland).

But the inspiration for including that song reference in today’s post was a real rainbow we saw here in Vancouver last week. A rather spectacular rainbow, actually:

Rainbow over North Vancouver, January 2016

Note that the photo above is a “sweep” panorama, since the rainbow was too wide to be captured by my (fairly wide-angled!) camera phone. That fact accounts for a little of a shakiness in the arc if you click to view it at a larger size.

Here’s another look just the top part the arc, taken in a single, non-panorama photo:

Arc of a Rainbow, Vancouver, BC

The title of this post actually comes from lyrics to an intro to the song that wasn’t performed in the movie, but was written by the original composers:

When all the world is a hopeless jumble
and the raindrops tumble all around,
Heaven opens a magic lane.

When all the clouds darken up the skyway,
There’s a rainbow highway to be found
Leading from your window pane
to a place behind the sun
Just a step beyond the rain.

Of course, we’re usually not quite a step “beyond the rain” here in Vancouver, as in winter there’s a lot of rain to go around.

But sometimes, just sometimes, when you’ve made it through the rain, you wind up with a rainbow as your reward.

Which makes Vancouver a  very nice place to be on a Travel Tuesday.