This past weekend was rather busy. Saturday was a rare sunny and warm day, so we decided to try to take full advantage. We started with our regular video chat with Grandma and Grandpa, had breakfast, and then biked down to Granville Island for Ocean Construction Supplies’ annual open house. Last year’s open house was of mixed success. This year was much better.
Ocean is an oddity. It’s a fully functional and operational and industrial concrete plant in the heart of a tourist destination. It actually fits quite well into its environment, with brightly and colourfully painted concrete trucks. (Note: We didn’t actually take any pictures of the cement trucks, so the next shot is by Maurice Jassak as found at http://www.seegranvilleisland.com)
Unlike last year, Aidan was excited to actually get in the cabs of some of the construction vehicles, like this large front-end loader. The cab was ok, but he didn’t want anything to do with the tires, bucket, …
Mommy was allowed to do this, but he didn’t like it very much…
He also sat in the cab of this concrete truck (this photo also by Maurice Jassak)
Part of the fun is a big pile of sand that they put out in the middle of their marshalling yard. They sprinkle this sand pile with Tonka trucks, and it ends up being swarmed by mostly boys, aged 3-6. This shot shows a rare moment when there were no other kids on the edge of the sand pile. Typically it looks like a very confusing hive of bees.
Lastly, he went back to the Bobcat that he sat in last year. This year, the camera survived.
After biking back home, we grabbed some lunch and then headed out geocaching!
We headed down to Delta, just south of Vancouver. There were a number of caches that were placed as part of the BCGA’s Cache Blitz 2008. These ones were rated 1.5/1.5 and there were about a half dozen of them so we figured it was going to be easy going.
It was no such thing. The first cache’s ground zero put us in the middle of a parking lot, with various heavy machinery nearby (a wood chipper, for example). It was right beside Splashdown Park, which was preparing for the coming season, so there were lots of muggles around. And lots of trucks. After poking around for a short while, we stopped. We just weren’t comfortable, and it wasn’t an appropriate area for Aidan.
Our next stop was out in the middle of nowhere, beside a fence post, a drainage ditch, and a pile of discarded building supplies. We searched for a while — the GZ put us in the middle of a field-like area — and then another geocaching crew pulled up. They found it in short order, in the pile of rubbish. I was refusing to look in there, but had pretty much figured it must have been there since it wasn’t anywhere else. I mean, I hate digging through garbage to find caches. What is that teaching Aidan? And, once again, the coords were off.
The third stop was much more satisfying. It was a short walk along the edge of a ball field, and Gwen found the cache within seconds of arriving at GZ.
The last stop was next to the highway, in some trees, surrounded by more trash, in an extremely hilly area. All the found logs noted that it took them forever to find it. We DNF’d this one too. 1.5/1.5? Not a chance. Also not appropriate for Aidan. And the trash again?
I was quite steamed by the end of the caching — quite frustrated. So, we went to DQ, grabbed some ice cream and drove down to Boundary Bay park to overlook the marshes and mud flats and eat some ice cream. It helped considerably.
Back to Vancouver and cleaned the apartment better than it had been cleaned for quite some time! Put the boy to bed and then Carla and Tomer came over and we played Thurn and Taxis for the rest of the night. It’s an interesting 2 player game; I’m not sure if it’s better with 4 or not. Tomer won both times, I’m sure he enjoyed himself.
On Sunday, it rained. We stayed inside.
