While we were in Seattle, we took a side trip to Vancouver,
Canada. We’ve heard really amazing
reviews from other people, but haven’t
been ourselves until now.
It was an interesting trip, and really glad we went but
Seattle was definitely more appealing to us.
In Vancouver, we stayed at Holiday Inn about 20 minutes outside of city center;
it had an inside pool, Subway right outside and free breakfast – what more can
you ask for :) We tried to do some
Vancouver specific sightseeing and opted to skip “old dusty church” but visited
the Granville Island which is a huge public market and
Stanley Park where boys got to run on the rocky beach and throw sticks in the
water amongst other things.
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| Vancouver view from Granville Island |
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| Stanley Island, Vancouver behind |
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| Team work! |
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| Always in action |
The one thing that was absolutely horrible and the waste of
money was the Dr. Sun Yat-sen Classical Chinese Garten. The location of it is far from the best, and
that should have been our first clue but noooo … we are persistent. We parked our car and started walking towards
the garden. Realizing that everybody is hungry and stopped by an authentic
Chinese place that was packed with people.
Well, authentic Chinese food is not something that we came to appreciate
– it was horrible! Afterwards we stop by
Starbucks because we NEEDED something better tasting and continued our way to the
garden. We had to go through a little
park and half-jokingly Chris tells the boys not to pick up any needles because
we are really in that kind of part of town.
Anton, being a good listener that he is, picks up a syringe instead! Back to the garden – tiny,
expensive, nothing to see AT ALL. We got
it covered in less than 10 minutes and thinking we missed something, we
actually asked the guy at the front gate and nope, it’s really that small.
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| Entire garden is in this picture |
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| This is outside of the paid section |
Capilano Suspension Bridge was awesome yet mildly horrifying
to those of us afraid of heights.
It’s a
walking bridge that is 230 feet (70 meters) above the ground and 460 feet long
(140 meters).
It is a beautiful scenery
but the bridge is suspended therefore it shakes under you.
Ilya was brave, held his tears back and on the
way back was much better – you have to cross the bridge to get to the park and
then cross it again to get back. The park had a tree climbing adventure where
there is a path that you follow on top of (kind of) the trees.
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| View from the bridge |
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| A bit narrow here :) |
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| Tree top adventure |
After that adventure we decided to head to
the Grouse Mountain; it still had snow on the ground and people were
skiing. I did overhear people on the
lift that skiing season is coming to an end – well, it’ is April people! We had lunch at the top and it is not often
that you actually see salmon on kids menus so I was impressed. Unfortunately, we did not pack enough snow
clothing so we skipped the sledding there (I forgot to mention that Knorr men,
minus the cousin, went snow-tubing outside of Seattle and loved it! It was a
beautiful sunny day and when I was getting the boys dressed, I seriously
layered them with tights, undershirts, sweaters, scarfs, you name it … From
what I heard they got undressed pretty quickly from all the running around).
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| View of the Vancouver, a bit hazy but shows how high we went |
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