Kits is for Kids

Vancouver is amazing!! I love this town. We covered so much ground today that when Melina and I were recapping our time in Vancouver she kept referring to “yesterday” when she talked about things we did this morning. Vancouver is beautiful and packed full of fun, kid-friendly things to do. When I asked Melina what she thought of Vancouver she said she loved it and then thought for a second and followed with, “I would like to come here by myself.” Does that mean she’s already planning where she wants to live when she grow up? Or is she saying it would be more fun without dear old mom and dad weighing her down? I’m not offended either way.

We started the day with breakfast near our apartment in the West End. We typically self cater for breakfast since the girls get up so early but our apartment doesn’t have a kitchen table and I’m not about to risk Anna’s beautiful furniture by letting our girls get food anywhere near it. But lucky for us Canadians love Eggs Benedict (they call them “Bennys” and there are multiple types on every menu we’ve seen) so we got to indulge in what is usually just a mother’s day treat for our family. 

Then we wandered along the waterfront park skirting False Creek (not a real creek?) and met tons of dogs on our way to catch the ferry to Granville Island (definitely not a real island). Granville Island was hopping and the girls enjoyed putting together a picnic for later in the day and chasing pigeons near the docks. I bought an adorable hat for my new niece (!!!) Bridget. The Kids Market was cute but a little too Chuck-E-Cheese for our taste so we hurried through and then crossed the street to the much more enticing (for us) Granville Island Brewery. We sampled a few tasty suds while Melina sampled a cream soda. If only they had milk for Diane we may have stayed all afternoon. But she was getting tired so we bought a bottle of the Kitsilano Maple Cream Ale (they had been out of it on tap but we didn’t want to miss out) and a bottle opener and hopped the ferry again to Vanier Park. Zach is drinking that ale as I type.

One of my favorite things about traveling is how the best parts of your day are often the ones that were totally unplanned. We had a lot of these moments before we had kids (discovering a secret route to an overlook in Cusco and watching an Andean Condor soar right by us, finding ourselves on a beach in Italy covered with pieces of beautiful sea-smoothed tiles and pottery shards instead of sand, witnessing the most hilariously pointless balloon display in an underground cavern in Belgium, the list goes on…). You’d think that with kids you’d lose this sponteneity, but in fact you have so many more of these moments! It must be because locals let down their guard around children and will stop to chat and then load you with free advice, often going out of their way to walk you to a favorite playground, restaurant, or shop. Having Melina around never hurts since she is way more likely than Zach or especially me to strike up a conversation with a complete stranger. 

So it wasn’t surprising to any of us that we ended up walking to Kitsilano (they call it Kits) with some locals who showed us the perfect place to picnic and ended up spending over an hour playing at an amazing playground right on the beach with the gorgeous city skyline as a backdrop. Diane, our slide junkie, nearly wore out the seat of her pants on the slide resembling those rollers you use in the airport to shove your bags through the x-ray machine. Melina made friends with locals and tourists on the teepee shaped merry-go-round that she pushed in a circle and then adeptly jumped onto, getting the kids to all chant, “FASTER! FASTER!” between hysterical giggles. Zach and I stood back and soaked it all in, our favorite part of the day.

We strolled back onto the ferry and hopped off at Yorktown, a trendier area that is probably much more exciting for most at happy hour. We checked out the roundhouse and climbed on train engine (more exciting for us) and then were all of a sudden surrounded by young girls pushing their way into a nearby hotel lobby and screaming. I asked someone what was going on and she yelled, “ONE DIRECTION!!!” as she snapped pictures above my head with her iPhone. “Oh!” I replied, and turned to Zach to whisper, “is that a band?” He says I’m “such a mom.” 

Melina was holding up quite well while Diane napped in the stroller so we hoofed it to Gastown, the old town area of Vancouver. Very cute and very touristy, but a fun change of pace from the glitzy modern buildings everywhere else in this city. By the way, can someone tell me why the buildings here seem so new and clean and modern? Was the building boom in the 1970s? Or did everything just get a facelift for the 2010 Olympics? We pondered this while we stopped for cappuccino and cheesecake. Melina lounged in the cafe window like a supermodel, watching the common folk on the street. The place was empty when we got there and packed when we left, so apparently she was good for business…!

Next was a walk to the Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden in Chinatown since we had heard it was gorgeous. Meh. We paid a hefty admission price to a tiny garden with turtles but NO koi only to find out that the bigger gardens WITH koi were in a separate, FREE section of the garden. You should be able to tell by my use of capital letters that I am still irritated about this and disappointed that Lonely Planet didn’t steer us in the right direction. Plus, the gardens (both the free and expensive sections) were just kind of standard and really didn’t hold a candle to the attention to detail and peaceful vibe of the garden we saw in Portland. Not to mention that there was way less koi.

The rest of our evening was uneventful but nice- after washing the grime off of the girls (I’ve started calling Diane “my little match girl” for the dirt she inevitably streaks across her face each day) we had some yummy burgers at Vera’s in Gastown and then hopped on a bus back to the apartment. The girls took a bath before I let them touch anything, then again ended the day by singing each other to sleep. Best music ever.