My friends know I never thought of myself as a stellar Girl Scout or much of a "can-do" outdoors gal, yet they fell for the idea of my human compass abilities ... they biked behind me along a path that lead to a gigantic lily pond.

We stopped to take pictures standing in the slush then I led them down to an area I was certain was the road leading to the other side of the park heading toward the much sought after Tea House. A few minutes later, my friend Nancy, said: "Hey, human compass, we're right back where we started! In fact, we just made a full circle."

The rain picked up as we cycled down more roads. Now all three of us were hungry, tired and in hysterics talking about how the evening news would have live reports from Stanley Park talking about search crews looking for three American women who never returned from a bike ride. We tried to recall how many people would be coming forward to the reporters how they had encountered the women and they had given them excellent directions and clear maps.

At one point we did pass a place to get food. It was named something like the Lumberjack Grill and served burgers and what-not. We pondered stopping there for lunch but decided we had too much invested in our Tea House dream to give it up.

My most depressing personal moment was when we finished cycling up an enormous hill and after we came down, we spotted someone who appeared to be a park employee. He rattled off directions and I thought to myself…he might as well be speaking a foreign language because I can't understand one word! He DID tell us something the others hadn't, "you're not far from lunch gals, do you see that brown roof over there?..."

We twisted around a road leading to the brown roof and suddenly gazed at gardens of colored flowers with our lunch destination tucked inside. It may have been a restaurant called The Pavilion and not the Tea House but it was wonderful. We locked up our bikes, shook off the rain drops and headed inside to hot tea, warm vegetable lasagna and an unbelievably decadent desert with coconut on the bottom, custard in the middle and a thick slab of chocolate like a Hershey bar on the top. We picked a table outside in the sprinkling rain, under a table umbrella as close to the flowers as possible. We were there for the day to celebrate our birthdays and a little bit of drama on the bike path couldn't spoil the adventure! We were finally found, fed and continuing to relish our day together in Stanley Park.