What if you could travel to Asia without getting on an airplane? Booking flights for a family of four is prohibitively expensive, so my kids have never seen the country where Mom is from.
The next best solution is packing stretchy pants and heading north to British Columbia. No cousins in Canada, but we did find tofu pudding and Taiwanese wheel cakes in Richmond’s
Yaohan Centre. Unless it’s B.C.-grown, produce and meat can’t go back across the U.S. border, so I was restricted by stomach capacity. Thirty minutes into Canada, I knew I had to come back.
A family getaway in Vancouver, B.C, gets you a lot of bang for your buck. Literally, because the exchange rate is like getting a 30 percent discount. It’s a three-hour drive to explore other cultures and languages, beginning with “ouvert” right at the border crossing.
In my 20s, I loved to drive up to Vancouver for shopping and gallery hopping. My husband went for shows and Canucks games. Then we had kids, and somehow 10 years slipped by before we managed another visit.
Oh,
Sun Sui Wah, I waited 10 years for that egg tart with the flaky crust! You know the food will be amazing when your husband is one of three white people in the restaurant. We tried another Canadian specialty,
poutine, at the chain restaurant White Spot. It turned out to be French fries slathered in cheese and gravy, which defeated all of our bellies.
As parents, we now see Vancouver through a very different lens. I pointed out the Buddhist temple off 99, and the ubiquitous Chinese characters. My 3-year-old charmed
obasans with his pint-size Mandarin. My 7-year-old was most impressed by the flashing green traffic lights – something you don’t see in the U.S.
We noticed we’d entered another country when the street signage switched to kilometers, but turning off GPS and smart phones was when the change really hit home. I navigated using paper maps – remember those? (Once we hit the hotel’s wifi, though, we were like crack addicts jumping for our phones.)
Just as Seattle has Pike Place Market, Vancouver has
Granville Island. We got turned around a few times trying to find its entrance, and my husband, exasperated, asked, “Is this a real place you can go to?” It’s so pretty it doesn’t seem real. Tucked under the Granville Street Bridge is an island with a public market, a maritime museum, an art institute and tons of shops. I’d never been to the Kids Market before, but now I had two good reasons to go. The boys roamed the two levels of shops and left giddy with their Vancouver souvenirs.
After a day in the car, the kids were happy to find a playground on Granville Island. I’d joked that we’d be getting takeout and going to playgrounds on our trans-national adventure, and that was 100 percent perfect for our family.
Every guidebook recommends the
Vancouver Aquarium,
Capilano Suspension Bridge and the
gondola at Grouse Mountain for families. We skipped these pricier attractions because spending $46.95 a ticket is budget-busting even with the exchange rate. (Woodland Park Zoo membership gets you a 20 percent discount at the aquarium.)
Instead, we opted for the glorious and free
Stanley Park. We brought the boys’ bikes from home; rentals are also available. After an obligatory stop at the famous totem poles, the kids set out to explore (a very small section of) the 13.7-mile seawall.
The paths are paved and flat, with separate lanes for bikers and pedestrians. Along the trail are lots of “rest stops” where the kids can take a look around: a lighthouse, rock sculptures, a dragon figurehead. On a weekday winter morning, there were no the tourist crowds, only sunshine and a jewel of a park to enjoy.
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Another free highlight of the city: the historic steam clock in Gastown that whistles every 15 minutes. I have dorky kids, one obsessed with telling time and the other with Roman numerals, so we could have stayed there all day watching the minutes tick by.
On the map, Chinatown looked like an easy stroll from Gastown. We made the mistake of walking down Hastings Street, which turned out to be quite seedy. I was relieved to see the red-painted lampposts when we reached Chinatown.
Maybe it was walking through Skid Row, but Chinatown didn’t seem nearly as vibrant as I’d remembered it. The rise of Richmond (
54 percent Chinese, according to the 2016 Census) likely sucked away some of Chinatown’s oomph. We saw shops selling weird dried stuff and
qi paos, but not many places selling actual groceries.
The one must-see in Chinatown is the exquisite
Dr. Sun Yat-Sen Classical Chinese Garden. From the street, the high white walls don’t look like much, but step inside and enter a Ming Dynasty scholar’s garden. Half of the park is free, half requires admission, so guess which side of the park we stayed on?
A few blocks south of Chinatown is the iconic globe built for Expo 86, now
Science World at Telus World of Science. Your Pacific Science Center membership gets you free admission here! We planned our Vancouver trip to catch the fantastic
Numbers in Nature special exhibit (through Sept. 3). Other galleries involved lots more physical fun, like playing with colored shadows, dancing on a giant piano, and taking in a live bubble show. A visit to Science World alone makes your PSC membership worthwhile.
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I booked a room at the
Rosedale on Robson, a dated but clean hotel in the heart of downtown. It checked off all the right boxes for our family: $105 a night, galley kitchen in our room and an indoor pool.
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Best of all, we lucked out with a room on the 15
th floor, where the kids parked themselves by the full-length windows, thrilled by the miniature traffic moving below. In the hotel lobby, there’s a framed aerial photograph of the neighborhood circa 1994, when the hotel’s lot was just a patch of dirt surrounded by parking lots. Hard to imagine now, with skyscrapers standing shoulder to shoulder.
I’m a city person, and I love that panorama of glistening high rises. I love that streets downtown end in views of snowcapped mountains and water. For nostalgia’s sake, we drove through the retail core on Robson Street, past all the clothing shops I used to frequent. (Fashion? Huh?)
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The kids had been too excited to sleep, and were pooped out by 4 p.m. No city nightlife for this crew. We vegged out to cartoons and
take-out BBQ pork. On our last morning in Vancouver, fat fluffy flakes drifted down from the sky, a magical end to our B.C. trip.
This story ran on ParentMap
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There’s a big climbing tower, monkey bars, a tent feature with rock-climbing grips, swings and a net climber. At 5,260 square feet, the new play area is more than four times bigger than the one it replaced. Construction began last August and wrapped up earlier this month. The official opening celebration is this Saturday, March 23. The park is already filled with neighborhood families more than ready to soak in spring’s warmth.
At West Seattle’s newest playground, my kids were most excited about the purple slide (there are 4 slides altogether). They discovered a scavenger hunt at the top of the fort, and threw themselves into tracking down all the hidden pictures. There’s a slide built right onto the slope, and some kids improvised by rolling down the turf. The new turf was perfect for babies lolling in the sun, and for lounging on when the kids got worn out from all that climbing and running.
We meant to just swing by and check out the park, but we ended up blowing right through lunchtime and staying for most of the afternoon. The new picnic tables next to the play area were perfect for a refueling snack break.
We parents lazily watched the kids tearing through the brand new play structures – until suddenly it got very quiet. A little girl tumbled out from the top of the biggest slide and crumpled on the ground. Grownups ran to help. Seeing a playground accident like that will make your heart stop.
The top of the big slide, the twisty one off the fort, is fairly open, so a kid tilting one way or another could topple out. My mom instinct also worried about the two small steps along the bridge up to the tower. I wish they’d been painted a bright color so kids notice them. I could just see someone racing along, miss those steps and face plant onto metal grill.
But look, the play area is cheerful and new and fun for kids. I’m the perpetual worry wart; my kids are already asking when they can go back. It’s a great playground and neighborhood well worth checking out. High Point is 520 feet above sea level, but it’s on a gentle slope so there’s not much of a view. To the west, you’ll see two soccer fields against a backdrop of so much new construction. You’ll get a much better vantage point from High Point Pond Park (6920 31st Ave SW), less than a mile away. Also nearby is the wonderful West Seattle Bee Garden (3108 SW Graham St), where kids can come by anytime to see real bee hives and learn about pollinators.
*Story on ParentMap here. 
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I just wrote this story for ParentMap about spring cleaning with kids, and now I'm totally motivated to Marie Kondo our house. 
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