Vancouver!

I love Vancouver and we should all move there.

Mr. Blackbird needed to travel to Vancouver for business so Jr and I went with him for a quick 3 night stay this week.

We stayed here, courtesy of Mr Blackbird's work (yay!)



The hotel was nice and in a fantastic location. It was practically adjacent to Stanley Park and right outside the doors was the seawall, a walking trail system that runs along the shore and into/around Stanley Park. Stanley Park was beautiful, of course. Lush temperate rainforest with huge old trees and all kinds of trails and fun things to do.

We went to the aquarium, which was even better than I remembered it. Their exhibits are truly impressive and well designed. Blackbird Jr loved the children's section, especially the Animal Hospital where he x-rayed stuffed seals to see what was the matter with them (each seal with a different malady), then weighed and measured the seals before using a stethescope to listen to their breathing and hearbeats. His second favourite highlight was a "little house", as he called it, which was a small corner you could enter by crawling through tunnels that were fish tanks. There was also a hands-on area where you could touch sea stars, but he wanted nothing to do with that. My favourites were the seahorses and jellyfish.

Our main transportation around the town was the Vancouver Trolley Company (picture from their website):



Cute, huh? It runs on a circuit stopping at different tourist attractions and tickets were good for two days. Much cheaper than cab rides, easier than sorting out the transit system (though we did use the Sky Train for a ride to Science World) and plus it stopped at our hotel. Easy peasy. The drivers were really nice and gave our tour info on the history or other information about the city as well.

One place we visited that was suprisingly very cool was the Vancouver Maritime Museum. I admit, I wasn't sure if it was going to be any good. I'm a prairie girl and my idea of what a maritime museum would be about is pretty limited. But, Blackbird Jr is into any kind of transportation, including boats so I thought we could check it out and I'm glad we did. The first thing we saw when we went inside was this huge boat, which turned out to have a very interesting history as an RCMP sailboat (a floating police detachment). It was used to carry supplies, transport criminals, and also transport Inuit children to residential school (ugh). We got to go on the boat and check out the under deck bunks (where the children slept?? ack!), the cabin crew's quarters and the captain's lookout. You can see a virtual tour of this boat here. There was all kinds of other cool stuff in the museum, including a submarine, mastheads, and anchors and other artifacts from sunken ships. Then, tucked in the back, there was a fantastic children's section! Blackbird Jr could have played there for hours. He pretended to drive a tugboat, used magnets to tuck boats into harbours, a crane to load pretend wheat onto a boat, we read some stories, there were costumes and all kinds of fun stuff. He asked to go back to the "Boat Museum" many times during the trip.

We also went to the Science World and the Vancouver Museum. Vancouver's World of Science was super cool. My favourite exhibit was where you got to shoot a ball out of a vaccuum pump up into the air, where it would land in a pool of water 2 stories up and then you could manipulate the waterfall to change how the balls go down in the water. We were there for a couple hours and only touched on a couple exhibits. Next time we will plan for an entire day there for sure.

The Vancouver museum was interesting, but more for me than Blackbird Jr. I cried reading about how in WWII Japanese Canadians were ordered into camps and all their posessions (they were allowed to bring 2 suitcases) were surrendered upon entry for "room and board". I remember learning about that in school but seeing the photographs and suitcases in the museum really touched me.

We also did a lot of walking along the seawall and watching the seaplanes land at the airport (seaport?) near our hotel.

I can't wait to go back. In summer they have a miniature railway and a children's farm in Stanley Park as well as splash parks and an outdoor pool along the oceanside.