We were supposed to go to Cypress Mountain today to see Snowboarding but alas, our tickets got cancelled...so we set out to re-visit Granville Island, a lovely hotbed of all kinds of activity. We took 3 types of transit to get there: bus, subway and this lovely Olympic line train. Somewhere along the way, sadly, the newest stuffed animal in Rachel Claire's menagerie, Sophie the soft stuffed seal, got lost. It was quite a disaster and led to a very sad 30 minutes before we rallied and continued on our way (following a promise to get another one at the Aquarium...).
The main reason we returned to Granville Island was to take a boat ride, which was awesome! There are these little boats that sail all around the water that surrounds Vancouver (not sure what the body of water is...). They go all different places. We took one that was empty and planned to ride it out and back. Our captain was a gal and darned if I didn't ask her name. She was gracious enough to give us a photo though. On the way back, a beautiful Bernese Mountain Dog joined us, so cool!
We had lunch at Granville Island Market which is wonderful and challenging all at the same time. Great food but very crowded, so obtaining said food and navigating the place to find a place to sit, with a 5 year old is not always easy. But we did it and got to listen to some lovely flute music.
We then headed to an ice skating adventure but stopped at Starbucks for an obligatory mocha first. Ice skating was quite cool...unfortunately I have video of it but haven't embedded any here. In Canada they have these cool little 3/4 square "walkers" on the ice for small kids to tool around in to learn to skate. They can lean forward on these things and push them around on the ice. Rachel Claire doesn't actually need this thing because she can skate just fine on her own, but she was a bit gunshy after falling on her head at the St. Richard's Ice Skating party before we left. We skated for an hour with no break she loved it so much. Also saw a mom with a baby in a stroller on the ice...they are crazy about skating there in Canada!
We then went to the playground that was next to the Sunset Community Center. Rachel Claire played with a brother and sister who seemed to be Russian.
In general we really loved so many things about Vancouver, it's international flavor, wonderful neighborhoods, very green-friendly, lots of opportunity for recycling and not buying everything new, lots of public transit options, everyone very used to being outdoors in winter and in generally pretty good shape. We ran into several "protests" with official observers and such...something we don't get much of here in Indy. And we LOVED our hosts, Holly, Roger, Will & Nick. They were delightful and their house was just wonderful. They gave up their master bedroom for us which was lovely, with a few out the window of the mountains...and all 6 of us shared one bathroom, which made for some crazy mornings, but in general it was just fine. We also loved their kitties, whose names I cannot recall...Calvin I think is one.
It's funny the things one remembers about trips like this...I will never forget sitting down at figure skating with Rachel Claire on my lap and almost crying because it was so cool and I had planned for so long to do it. Rachel Claire on the other hand, will mostly remember losing Sophie the seal and the kid who was mean to her in line at hockey...oh well, that's why we have photos so we can go back and look at the stuff we don't remember.
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