Vancouver, BC

Judah finds me no matter where we are.  We always wake up in a different place and he always knows where I am. I get to cuddle this sweet warm little body every morning until I’m completely ready to wake up.  I hear him coming by the rattle in Sleep Monkey (Keep monkey) and Pink Baby as he sleepily carries them around the bed to my side. Adam was not in bed, he had gotten up much earlier because he pulled something in his neck as he was moving around on the air mattress.  He was completely stiff when I saw him.  He could not move his head one way or the other. He was in agony. We packed up, cleaned up, and dosed up on Motrin. We walked with David, Becky, and Toby to 14 carrot diner where we had the best cinnamon roll ever and we spilled two glasses of drink as we always do. We said goodbye to our sweet friends and got on the road to Vancouver.

The drive was totally quick and easy to Vancouver.  We made it to the border where we sat FOR E VER.  There were American police/ICE (they wear outfits that say POLICE on them and carry around a million weapons) on the American side just walking around in a pack and yelling at people to open their cars and empty them.  It was so strange, I grew up on a border and never once saw border patrol hassling people about getting OUT of the country.  This was very handmaiden’s tale-y. No like.  We made it through and drive into Surrey, just south of Vancouver.  We went to a Greek restaurant in White Rock on the beach and the kids ate escargot for the first time. We got ice cream behind a gaggle of Chinese middle schoolers on the biggest field trip ever.  They were just shoving $100 bills at the poor kids behind the counter who just kept saying, “You already paid!  This is YOUR money.” I found a wad of bills and asked them all if it was theirs and none of them would take it. One little girl agreed to take it to their teacher when they found her. I ordered a large ice cream and they gave us four little cones so I could sperate the scoops and give each kid their own- a true luxury in a family this big.  The kids were in heaven.

We walked back to the van and got to our hotel/house/Airbnb.  I booked it with our Chase Reserve points.  Hold on, side bar about this card.  It has no foreign transaction fees, which is hard to find. They reimburse up to $300 in travel costs back onto your card, they have free roadside assistance (this is what we used when the van broke down in Seattle), you can book travel with your points for 1.5x the value making it VERY cheap, and you get like 3x points on gas and restaurants which is very helpful. Anyway, we love this card. So I had booked it through their travel site and it made it look like a hotel but it was a BnB run by this really sweet couple.  They live in a room on the bottom floor and we had rented out the whole top floor, three bedrooms and 2 baths.  We also had full use of the common areas. We settled the kids in and I went to yoga nearby.  It was a new type of flow which is good, I need to get out of my comfort zone sometimes.  Our hosts had a beautiful heated pool in the backyard and super hot jetted hot tub. Adam loved this after being in the car with his injured neck. Elia and Judah made full use of the pool and we had to drag them out.  She swam the whole length of the pool, I am so proud of the swimming lessons we have been doing together.  Judah also feels so comfortable propelling himself around the pool with his floatie which is definitely because of the time we have spent at the JCC on his lessons. We all ended up in the hottub before heading upstairs to make some sandwiches, take showers, and get in bed.  Elia and Judah’s room had stars in the ceiling.  They had installed lights through the attic into the room and painted their ceiling dark blue.  It was gorgeous! The whole house was like this, definitely the nicest place we have stayed- we got a few ideas for our house when we get back from worldschooling.

July 6, 2019

When we woke up, our hosts had made a beautiful breakfast on the deck by the pool.  We cleaned up and got everyone ready for a big drive to Whistler on the Sea to Sky highway.  We do not have service in Canada!  Thanks T-mobile. We used our old fashioned GPS/map skills to navigate Vancouver and make it to the beginning of the Sea to Sky highway.  On our way there, we saw a HUGE fire that had almost definitely been started by a cigarette.  It was in some brush on the side of the road.  We also passed by a huge beautiful park covered in tents.  This was clearly a homeless camp. The whole neighborhood we drove through was full of homeless people.  There was a store on the corner with fruits and veggies- you would not see this in America. They just seem to take better care of people here. We made it to the highway and looked out over the views around us. It was so rainy and cloudy that we couldn’t see anything at all.  Were we really interested in driving five hours in the rain to not really see or experience anything just to say we did it? We turned around and went back to Vancouver to explore.  We found that the big beautiful museum in the downtown Vancouver was covered by our science museum reciprocal pass! We found 2 hour parking nearby and checked in.  This museum did such a good job of talking about conservation in a way that left a lasting impression.  For example, a display asked you to make a plate of food and then it filled a screen of bathtubs with how much water it took to create that plate of food.  The boys and I tried to fill the most bathtubs (a plate of meat at 57 bathtubs!) and the least water (tea,  tomatoes, water, and an orange at 0.7 bathtubs).  I won’t soon forget that. We played a bit, fed the meter, and walked to lunch at Bodega to have tapas. This food was excellent and spicy and we had amazing table right at the window. Yes, we spilled something. We fed the meter and went back to the museum to play. We watched an IMAX dome movie about the great bear national forest in British Colombia that focused on the rare white Spirit Bear. This was the best IMAX/dome movie I have ever seen.  Judah slept through it which was actually our goal. They had a mirror maze.  They had a display about sex, sexuality, consent (complete with the tea explanation video), and anatomy.  It was so respectful of young people and their curiosity and intelligence.

Overall, Canada just seems to trust their people more than the USA trusts us. Pretty much everything is legal and people are expected to just not act a fool.  If people fall down, they help them back up. Everyone is so freaking friendly. Not nice- nice is about niceties and the way people should act. Friendly is different and genuinely cares about you as a human. We stayed at the museum until closing at 6 pm, fed the meter which would keep our van safe for the rest of the night, and hopped on a bus to a Lebanese restaurant called Nuba that my friend’s wife from Vancouver had suggested.  The restaurant was packed with people.  We walked in, looking haggard as usual and asked about the wait for a table of six. The hostess looked around and said, “I think I can get you in right now.” She led us to a perfect little nook in the room with a bench on one side perfect for our group.  The menu was had something called “Le Feast” that the server said would easily feed all of us if we ordered three portions. It was SO MUCH FOOD and all of it was vegetarian and amazing.  The boys found that they love pickled red cabbage, eggplant stew, and Lebanese food in general. As we were wrapping up our long multi course meal, a group next to us got up to leave.  They stopped by our table and marveled at how well our children sat through the meal. They said they just started taking their kids to meals like this and they are in their late teens and early twenties!  It feels so good to hear this.  We start taking the kids to meals as babies. We sit through many meals of spilling drinks, lying down in the booth, having a crying fit, kids fighting one another, and saying over and over that they cannot get up.  All of that is worth it because by the time they are around four years old, we get to have long beautiful meals as a family where everyone participates, appreciates the food, and acts in a respectable manner.  It works, it just takes a long time.  This is very French, as I learned from Bringing up Bebe, the best baby book in the world.

We finished our favorite meal of the trip and hopped back on the bus to go to Stanley Park for the opening of Newsies at Theatre Under the Stars in Malkin Bowl. I had been stalking the online box office months in advance to get tickets the second they went on sale and that paid off!  The boys were very surprised when I led them to the second row right in the middle.  This beautiful outdoor venue was enclosed by flowers and trees and a large grassy area where the dozen children lucky (or not) enough to attend were running, wrestling, boxing, and dancing. It was so refreshing to see children doing all of these things and their parents weren’t freaking out and helicoptering over them. It made it much easier for ours to blend in rather than being the usual spectacle. The show was really good.  I have a habit of falling asleep during live performances which is why I put myself front and center so I could stay engaged.  It worked on Judah as well- I was worried he would lose interest and start yelling. For the last half though, he did say “ALL DONE!” very loudly every time they finished a song or conversation. The actor playing Jack Kelly was ridiculously good looking which also helped me keep my eyes open. It ended at 1030 pm, just as the sun was setting. We caught the bus back to our car.  The bus in Vancouver was really cool, all people ride it: business people, homeless, kids, college students, elderly, disabled, tourists- all happy to chat with one another.  Not one of the drivers charged us, maybe because it was a hassle to charge my American card but it was nice either way.

We made it back to our palace in Surrey around midnight where our host was up in his bathrobe waiting on us- he said he just wanted to make sure we were safe. We crawled into our beds and slept deeply until morning.