Vancouver, in conclusion

And thus our Grand Canadian 2013 Adventure concluded. Overall, our time in Vancouver was excellent and free of hassles. No one got sick. No fender benders in which we discovered if our US car insurance was really valid in Canada. Lots of good family time and memories. Here are a few more random memories, and also tips and observations about extended trips that I'd like to record and share.

• If you're going to be somewhere more than a week or two, go get a library card! We got movies and books from the local library several times a week. It fills the time when you're just hanging around at home and makes you feel a bit more of a part of the community where you're temporarily living. There are bulletin boards in libraries with lots of potentially interesting happenings in the neighborhood.
• Along the same lines, rent an apartment or house. One of the fun parts of travelling is imagining and experiencing what it is like to live somewhere else. Living in a neighborhood and shopping for and cooking your own food helps in those regards. It is nice to have neighbors to chat with about what to see, etc and enlightening to see how much neighbors do or don't interact with each other.Also, it is much, much cheaper than staying in a hotel.  
• One night Joseph and I went to see Hamlet at the Bard on the Beach Shakespeare festival. It was a great performance, although I thought it tried a little too hard to be edgy and current. 
• A highlight was accidentally going to a Japanese BBQ place for lunch one day. We were trying to go to a different Japanese restaurant, which turned out to be upstairs, but by the time we realized our mistake we were already sitting down and things looked interesting and delicious. So we ordered a ton of raw meat and vegetables that we cooked over the flame at our table, and it was super delicious and the boys loved the experience. The waitress was surprised we were able to consume the huge amount of food that we ordered. We have skills. Afterwards Caleb observed that we most definitely did not just "eat meat sparingly."
• Our family spent every day together for a month. It was a luxury and a blessing. Also, it gets a bit annoying. On every one of our extended summer trips, one day a few weeks into it Nephi and I look at each other and know that we are both DONE with Family Fun. Another day at the beach together, another hike, another museum... UGH. But the kids are still there. So we go do something anyway. Usually it wears off after a few days. We're pretty sure it means we're doing something wrong - the structure of our trip, or something - but we don't know how to fix it. I think the same thing would happen if we were all at home together. I wonder if it's just too much Vacation that it crosses over into indulgence, but it's hard to think of how to make things more meaningful. With four small kids, we just can't go build Habitat houses or save orphans in the third world or something. If anyone has ideas, we'd love to hear them.
• The traffic was truly terrible in and around Vancouver. Apparently a few decades ago the city made an intentional decision to not build any way around the city but through it, on surface streets. The woman who lives in the house where we stayed is a professor at UBC, so on the several days we were over that way we got to imagine what it would be like to do it every day. (Terrible, if you're wondering). 40 minutes of stop and go city traffic each way. Nephi drove 99% of the time we were there, and bless him for it.  
• Along the same lines, big cities move at a much, much faster, more intense pace than I am used to these days. People must have Careers to afford to live in the cities, and they Commute to their jobs in Nice Cars and live in Nice Houses or Condos. It is a lot of work, and all very expensive. I was exhausted by the time we got home each day. 
• Probably as a consequence of the above, people in general seemed to have small families there. With our four kids we were somewhat of a novelty/freak show, especially since we are so "young". Like many places with educated, affluent populations, I got the sense that people wait to have their one or two kids until they are well established in their careers. This happens all over, but not really where we live. I got the sense that there is all kinds of support for families in that situation with their one or two kids - nursing rooms all over the place, daycares, etc - but when you got into our situation life would be a lot trickier. Housing to fit a large family is extremely expensive and rare, driving and parking a minivan in a city is tricky, and to pay for our family to ride public transportation into and out of the city for one day would have cost $40. I'm pretty sure we couldn't swing living there without me also working full time at a serious career.
• One of the quirkiest things we noticed was the raging "Baby on Board" fad. Remember the little signs people would put on their car windows in, like, 1987 that said "Baby on Board"? (Think way back, because you probably haven't seen one for fifteen years). Well, inexplicably they are very popular in Vancouver. I don't know.

And I'm going to stop there. We had a great trip! Vancouver is a great city! But I'm glad I don't live there! 

Pacific Northwest friends

One of the best things about travelling around is seeing old friends we knew in various other places - usually college or grad school - who now have settled around the country and world. The Pacific northwest held its share of wonderful people we knew in past lives.

 Vivek and Alisa

Vivek worked in the lab at BYU where Nephi spent several years doing research and where I worked for a summer. The last time we saw Vivek and Alisa was 13 years ago at their wedding, and it was very fun to catch up with them. Since then they've amassed between them (at least) two PhDs, an MBA and two children and have lived on two continents. They've got interesting perspectives and experiences to share! We first met them at the beach near their home in White Rock, then ate a delicious lunch at a local restaurant, and spent the rest of the day at their home where they put together the most incredible, authentic Indian dinner. It was a real treat.

 

 

 

Ken and Mindy 

Nephi knew Ken from College Bowl days at BYU, and we were later in the best book club ever with both of them while we lived in Salt Lake a few years later. Our oldest sons were born just a few months apart when we lived there. We last saw them a few years ago when Nephi and I visited Washington. This time we met them in Bellingham, Washington where we ate lunch at the most delicious burger place, then took a nice hike at a state park before finishing the day off with some gelato. We loved hearing about their recent and upcoming travels and projects.

 

 

The hike we took had a large, pretty lake at the end of it. It was a chilly day and the water was freezing. My boys jumped in. Naturally.

 

The kids really got along well and had fun along the way.

 

Jen 

Jen was my good friend when we lived in San Diego and we loved staying with her for a bit on our way home. Jen has a pretty rough few years, but there are all kinds of good things before her now. She is funny and real and I love being around her and talking about books, and my boys had a great time with her Lucy, a toddler playmate of Joseph's from long ago. She also took the opportunity to demolish both Nephi and me in Boggle. If you are someone who thinks you are pretty good a Boggle, I am sorry to inform you that you are probably wrong and I won't believe you until you beat Jen, even once. (Note: I did actually beat Jen once at Boggle, and in front of other people to boot, which might have given me a temporarily big head. By now, after years of her crushing me every single other time we've played, sometimes by orders of magnitude, it is clear that it was an absolute fluke.) She made us all kinds of delicious food - fluffy waffles with whipped cream, a pizza roll and salad fresh from her garden, a carrot cake, and cotton candy. I have to apologize that this is the only picture I have from our time there.

 

Brenda and Nate 

We've had the good fortune of bumping into Brenda and Nate several times, first when we were all at BYU as students, and a few years later we met up with them again in San Diego where Nephi and Nate were in grad school. Brenda and I had little toddlers toddling around us while we book clubbed and writing grouped and playgrouped and beached together. It was a good life! (Although it sounds cushier than it was, really. Toddlers and babies and pregnancy, man. Unless you're in the middle of it you really can't appreciate the stress and frustration such little people can generate.) But we are now mostly past that, and it was fun to see where we all are now. Brenda and Nate are, currently, far more professionally ambitious than Nephi and I. It gave me a lot to think about. Nate was a superstar grad student and skyrocketed into legit top-tier scientist-hood very quickly, and he now runs a lab and does Real Scientist sorts of things, which as it turns out is mostly rustling up money, which is very challenging and time consuming and stressful, especially in this age of sequester and such. Brenda is a year into a top ranked PhD program and of course rocking it because that is her modus operandi. There is a level of professional awesomeness and accomplishment in their lives that I currently don't feel. But they were also very open about the high level of stress that their daily life tends to entail, and I also know that I tend to deal very poorly with stress. It is all trade offs. It is fascinating to have friends negotiating this stage of life differently.

 

And look at all the kids we've generated, and all so big!

 

Amy and Regan 

Our last stop on the way back home was with our friends Amy and Regan, who lived briefly in our neighborhood in Colorado before returning to Idaho. They are currently living in Twin Falls, and I enjoyed our brief time there. Although Idaho is a strange place. It seems to oscilate between hyper-upscale-recently-developed-McMansion-and-fancy-shopping and wait-is-it-still-1983, both in aesthetics and general vibe. 1983 wasn't a bad time, mind you. If you miss it, try visiting Idaho. There are roller skating rinks there, and ranchettes, and friendly people with lots of kids and stay at home moms, and summer evenings jumping on trampolines and kids spraying each other with hoses and picking strawberries straight off the plants and running barefoot through the grass in the most perfectly lovely light as the summer heat fades and a light breeze floats by. The last part might be particular to Amy and her family's home, I don't know. It is surprising to realize that their family only lived near us for about a year and a half. Amy has a real gift for forming friendships, and I know many people who dearly miss her, me included.

 

Nephi also misses Regan, who was a great rock climbing buddy. They took the chance to rock climb for a bit in the morning along the Snake River before we spent the rest of the afternoon swimming in the river. The gorge carved out by the river through the volcanic rock in that part of Idaho is really dramatic and beautiful.

 

Just a ways down the Snake River are Shoshone Falls, which were enormous! And the river wasn't even running very high.

 

So many wonderful people! Thank you, friends. We loved seeing you all and count it a blessing.

Vancouver Island

We decided we couldn't spend a month in British Columbia without at least stopping by Vancouver Island. (Quick geography lesson, since I didn't know this until I started planning our trip. The city Vancouver in on the coast of the mainland, not on Vancouver Island. The city that starts with a V and is the capitol of BC and that is on Vancouver Island is Victoria.) For awhile we were thinking of spending the whole trip on the island, especially since we had such a grand time on the Big Island a few years back.  I'm glad we didn't, however. Vancouver Island is a very rural place, more rural than I expected from reading travel books about it. Vancouver is a big city. I can really understand the appeal of escaping the big city for a vacation if you live in the big city. However, we live in a town without a stop light, so rural isn't really a big novelty or draw. We'll deal short term with nightmarish traffic and $10 parking in exchange for museums and ethnic restaurants and call that a vacation. We don't mind compressing for a little while.

But we did want to see the island, so we went over for two days. The ferry rides over from Vancouver and back to Seattle through the San Juan islands were beautiful!

 

The first thing we did was go for a hike to lovely Englishman River Falls.

 

 

 

There was a freezing body of water, so obviously the boys immediately took off their clothes and jumped in. It was so cold that even Joseph acknowledged it. But very beautiful! I do love my adventurous, brave boys that aren't about to pass by a fun time just because the water is a little (extremely) cold.

 

 

 

The next day we were absolutely enchanted by Victoria. The city really pulled out all the stops and made the hard sell. Around the inner harbor we loved several street performers' shows. There was a jazz ensemble that we watched for awhile, then a very entertaining unicyclist and juggler. We felt bad we had given our last shred of cash to the jazz ensemble.  

 

Then we wandered through Beacon Hill park, the largest urban park in Victoria, and it was lovely and refreshing and surprising. Around one corner is an enormous watering can art installation/splash park, around the next is a wild wooded area, and up around the next is a large concert venue with a free lunchtime concert going on. At the end of our wanderings through the park, and on the afternoon of our very last day in Canada, we found our boys doing this. Hockey.

 

We realized it was time to get the heck out of Canada before they started saying "eh" all the time. So we grabbed some very delicious Greek food for dinner and hopped on the next ferry home.

Beaches of Vancouver

The beaches were one of our favorite parts of Vancouver. There are so many with different flavors and quirks. The boys in particular wanted to spend every day at the beach. The first two weeks of our time in the area - the last two weeks of June - had lots of weather I associate with the Pacific northwest - clouds, rain, 65 degrees. The boys, as long as the rain wasn't too hard, saw this as perfectly acceptable beach weather. The parking was pretty easy on days like that. The majority of the few other people on the beach would be wearing fleece coats, and my kids would be splashing and swimming around in the very cold water. Nephi too. Ca. ra. zy. But come July 1st, the weather was pretty much perfect every single day. Sunny, and about 80 degrees. Every day! It started getting boring. We (I) did enjoy the beaches a bit more once the weather turned. 

One of my favorite beaches was called Sandy Cove. It is in a rambling, mega-expensive old neighborhood in West Vancouver. There aren't any signs, and there are like three parking spots. To get there you walk down a steep, overgrown staircase and along a jungle-like fern gully to get to a lovely secluded beach. We were the only people there for the longest time, but later in the day a few other people showed up. It was a sea glass hot spot, and Caleb was in serious collecting mode.

 

 

 

Another favorite beach day was at Deep Cove, a place I mentioned in my hiking post. The boys made friends with a few other kids, and they spent hours jumping off a platform out in the water and collecting starfish (which we put back). Nephi caught a jelly in our sandwich container and was the coolest Dad on the beach.

 

 

 

This is a view near English Bay, a very popular beach just a block from downtown. This beach was a little surreal, sitting there on the sand with a huge, bustling, hip city at my back and this view before me. This is why people live in Vancouver. It also had a pretty strong spring break, hard body vibe. Lots of young people and bikinis and loud music. I felt distinctly middle-aged. And parking was a real pain. But we came here twice because of the water slide that the lifeguards run during high tide.

 

Kitslano is another beach in the hip part of town. There were two very friendly, patient, kind young guys and a girl who had a real, full sized shovel and wanted to make themselves a little hot tub to sit in. Our boys were of course completely captivated by the project and helped in any way they would let them. The teenagers lost interest in the project before the boys so we kind of inherited it. Nephi especially enjoyed the day that someone else got to do the bulk of the digging for a beach project.

 

The beach we visited most often and was closest to our apartment was Ambleside. It had views across to Stanley Park and Lions Gate bridge, easy parking, nice sand, and we could watch the cruise ships come into and out of the harbor.

 

 

Hiking around BC

We also did a fair amount of hiking around Vancouver. British Columbia is a truly beautiful place and we only scratched the surface of the many trails and wild places around the city. North Vancouver has a system of connected trails - the Baden Powell trail - that stretches all along the region, up and down mountains and through forests. We hiked several sections of it over the weeks, and one section was just a short walk from our apartment. It also includes world class mountain biking, but we didn't do any of that.

One thing about British Columbia is that it rains there, and rains grows the most amazing trees, lots of fun for climbing.

 

Here is our family on the Lynn Canyon suspension bridge, which was right in our neighborhood.

 

Part of the UBC museum passport was admission to their large botanical gardens, which were very lovely and a real bust with the kids. It was very helpful in determining how much we weren't going to spend the time or money to visit Butchart Gardens on the island later in the trip. A very cool part of the gardens, however, and very popular with the kids, was this treetop walkway. It was lots of fun to walk along the narrow little center plank through the trees. It felt considerably narrower than it looks in these pictures. We went initially on a tour with a guide and older nervous people and our family restrained ourselves pretty well, but the kids and Nephi went back after the tour to see how much they could make everything bounce and shake and sway and rattle. Quite a lot, it turns out.

 

 

There was a real wild huckleberry craze among the boys. They grew along most any trail we visited, and the competition was fierce for the tasty little berries.

 

Look at all that moss and water. Trees don't look like this in Colorado. This was along a short trail down to a very pretty gorge past the Capilano fish hatchery and damn.

 

One of the nicest days we spent was at Deep Cove, a little community just east of North Vancouver with lots of fancy, quirky houses crammed along the steep shoreline of a gorgeous cove. Before we went to the beach we hiked along the Baden Powell trail to a pretty lookout. We went on the beautiful, sunny day after Canada Day, so it was kind of like Labor Day weekend and the trail was really popular. It's the only time the trails felt crowded.

 

 

One day we drove up to Whistler, about an hour and a half north of where we were staying. The drive is along the "Sea to Sky Highway" and is gorgeous. For the first stretch you wind along the ocean with great views of beautiful wooded islands, and it stretches up into the mountains.

 

We stopped at this really impressive waterfall for a few minutes (you drive up to the viewpoint)and on the way back saw a black bear right alongside the road.

 

Whister the town looked like every other recently developed ski town I've visited, kind of like faux Switzerland. We walked around a lake up there, then took a hike up along a ski run to another lake and some very beautiful views of the surrounding mountains. There were great views in particular of the very distinctive twin peaks called "The Lions", in the distance in this picture. And you know that when Nephi saw those distinctive peaks, he had to climb them.

 

So early one morning he climbed the one peak that is in bounds to climbers. I was extremely anxious; I mean, look at the peaks, and he was solo! But he reports that it really wasn't that big of a deal. And look at the views!

 

 

British Columbia, you are a beautiful place. The outdoor opportunities in close range to Vancouver are really amazing.

Museums of Vancouver

Our kids are museum people. Not art museums, mind you, but any other kind of museum. A few months ago Caleb asked wistfully, "When can we go to a museum? It's been so long since we've been to a museum!" They still think fondly back to our time perusing the Smithsonians and wish we had spent even more time there. So one exciting thing about our time in Vancouver was all the museums. Here are some quick summaries.

Vancouver Aquarium 

One of the first things we did in Vancouver was visit the Aquarium with my parents. It was nice as far as aquariums go, but pretty pricey, which does seem to be how aquariums go. There were lots of interesting fish and sea creatures, and a beluga whale show.

 

Nephi volunteered and got to eat some jellyfish, so that was cool.

 

We saw this very strange sea creature in one tank.

 

Jellies!

 

McMillian Space Center 

We had high expectations for this place that it didn't quite live up to, but still we had a good time. We bought a family membership thinking that we'd visit more than we did. The exhibit hall is very small, but there were excellent shows on various space topics like how astronauts live in space and exploring and visiting Mars. Our boys were totally engaged and volunteered for everything they could. The planetarium was closed for renovations and an experimental theater performance on the days we tried to visit, but Nephi and the three older kids went to a show and star gazing program one night.

 

 

World of Science 

This was an excellent science museum! It is part of the ASTC Passport Program, which means with our Denver Natural History Museum membership we could get in here free, so we spent parts of three days here. The shows were entertaining. Here Joseph demonstrates his faith in Newtonian physics by not flinching as a bowling ball comes hurtling towards his face.

 

There were also displays about phyics and the human body, as well as a big room full of optical illusions and puzzles that we enjoyed. There was a visiting exhibit on sex, which I perused to determine if it was appropriate for the kids, which it emphatically was not. It was an exhibit about sex, not how babies are euphemistically made. That was covered nicely in the human body exhibit. Our favorite place was the room full of Keva planks. Building with blocks is a very satisfying way to pass some time and we spent quite a few hours in here.

 

UBC Museum of Anthropology 

This is the flagship museum of the University of British Columbia. The museum itself is beautiful, and it houses a world class collection of artifacts from Pacific northwest First Nations, including totem poles. It also has collections from various native people all over the world, a large collection of work from the famous Haida artist Bill Reid including his sculpture The Raven and the First Nation, a reproduction of a Haida house constructed by Bill Reid and others, as well as a visiting exhibit of art from contemporary middle Eastern artists. Throughout the day we (various combinations of adults and children) went on several excellent tours which really enhanced the experience.

 

 

UBC Nitobe Gardens

This was part of our UBC museum passport that we bought, so we spent a little time wandering through this very pretty, carefully tended Japanese tea garden. Four children didn't really enhance the peaceful, harmonious atmosphere, but it was a lovely place.

 

UBC Beatty Museum of Biodiversity 

This is a wacky place. It's more of a resource for the biology department at UBC than a museum, and houses a huge collection of specimens of various lifeforms illustrating the evolution of life on earth. Nephi thought of lots of ways he could use such a resource in his biology classes. There are a few displays of preserved animals, and Benjamin especially loved them.

 

As it turns out, most life forms on earth are not feathered, furry, or cute. They tend more towards slimy, snakelike, scaled, and disturbing. Biologists and the people who put together this museum made peace with this a long time ago, but I think it takes the rest of us a bit by surprise. The museum folks refuse to pander to our squeamishness, so there are rows and rows and rows of bizarre specimens floating in preservatives in very large jars, then backlit. Like so.

 

Joseph got to dissect a sheep eyeball with the assistance of a biology undergrad, so he was jazzed.

 

The entrance to the museum features an enormous suspended blue whale skeleton, and there is a really interesting film that they show throughout the day telling the story of the skeleton. It seems that for the most part the architect thought, "It would be so awesome to have a huge blue whale skeleton suspended in the opening to our museum!" And then proceeded to design the whole building around that concept. Then it came down to the detail of finding such a skeleton, which is no easy task. And once such a skeleton is found, there is the considerable challenge of cleaning the rotting flesh and blubber off of and out of the bones so it doesn't stink like a rotting carcass. Also, they forgot to design an entrance to the museum large enough to fit the skeleton through. It was quite a story!

 

Fort Langley

This is a living history national historical site that recreates the fort used by the Hudson Bay Company. It was very casual and had interesting presentations. There was also a gold panning station, and Isaac demonstrated quite a knack for finding the little nuggets.

 

 

I think that scratched the museum itch for quite awhile; thanks, Vancouver!