Shhhh, come close, I have a secret to tell. It pains me to say this, but this past Sunday Saturday, we went to Surrey.

Actually, Surrey gets a bad rap. It’s just a typical suburb to a big city, with everything that goes along with that. Although I really don’t know any “Surrey girls”, they seem to have the same reputation as “Passage girls” did when I went to high school. That’s Eastern Passage, a small community outside of Halifax, that bears absolutely no resemblance to Surrey whatsoever.

So “Why,” you may ask, “why did you go to Surrey?” Well, we went to Surrey to take in the Surrey Children’s Festival. Now, Vancouver has a perfectly good, well renowned children’s festival of its own. Close too, located down in Vanier Park. However, the Vancouver festival is (a) expensive, and (b) not very toddler oriented. Surrey’s Children’s Festival had many things to do for toddlers, including several toddler-specific tents with things like tunnels, and ride-on cars, and a big sand pit, and so on. Also, live music. Also, free. Well, mostly free.

So on Sunday Saturday, after Aidan’s nap, we rushed into the car and headed down the East-West Connector to Bear Creek Park. We’ve never been to Bear Creek Park, but have driven by it a few times. This is a park located just south of the Whalley neighbourhood, which is notorious as much for its drug and homelessness problems as for its Little League teams. It was a bright, sunny day, with the thermometer pushing 30°. It was a very popular event, and the parking lots were packed beyond capacity.

The reason we rushed was because, if our timing was right, we intended to take Aidan to his first concert (well, I guess his second if you count seeing Charlotte Diamond in the City Square Mall). At 4pm on Sunday Saturday, Fred Penner was playing the last of 4 shows he performed at the festival. Fred Penner missed my generation — he hit his stride more with people my sister’s age. I certainly remember the show “Fred Penner’s Place“, but I was somewhat beyond the age that it targeted. Regardless, we both know who he his, and several of his songs. Maybe not as many as Raffi or even Sharon, Lois, and Bram (who were also a little later than us, but not quite as much).

Things worked out well, and we had a chance to explore the festival’s venue, take in some of the sights and sounds, and let Aidan blow off some steam in one of the toddler play areas. Maybe 10 minutes before the performance we brought him into the theatre, since the “main stage” was actually indoors at the Surrey Arts Centre. Aidan had never been in a theatre before, and was quite impressed by the blue-mini-light lit stairs and spring-loaded chairs. By the time the show started, the theatre was perhaps a little over half full, and a good portion of the crowd was running up and down the stairs, or in front of the stage, or through the rows of seats. Not in an awful way, but in the way you would expect several dozen toddlers and preschoolers to behave. This made controlling the boy a little on the difficult side, but we managed.

The house lights went down and the show started. Aidan sat on his seat, transfixed. Although I don’t think he recognized many of the songs, he was pretty good in absorbing them, and the whole atmosphere of the show. He didn’t sit on his seat the whole time: some times he was standing up, clapping and banging his hands on the (empty) seats ahead of us, sometimes he was dancing, and sometimes his attention wandered and he wanted to run up and down the stairs. In which case, I might add, he would have simply been joining a few other toddlers.

I must say that I was incredibly impressed with how well Fred managed the show, and the crowd. It certainly showed why he’s so popular and successful. The show was peppered with bits oriented to the parents, with his guitarist breaking into the riff from Stairway to Heaven, and at another time Fred slipped a little bit of the Juno-winning “Crabbuckit” into the end of “The Cat Came Back“. He talked to and interacted with the gaggle of kids that had broken through security and rushed the stage. After several people had taken photos and had been chastised by the theatre staff, he told the crowd (and the staff) that since it was the last show of the festival that they should relax the rules and let people take as many photos as they’d like. And so they did.

At one point when Aidan was getting restless, he was crawling on the floor, under the seats through the toddler-proclaimed “tunnel!”. Unfortunately Gwen had a slight incident involving the chair seat and the crouching toddler. There was some loud crying and it was clearly heard on stage. Fred turned to us, and asked the name of the crying child. We told him, and then he proceeded to talk to Aidan, using his name several times. Well, you can imagine that this got the boy’s attention pretty quickly and the tears evaporated within moments. Again, it showed how good he is with the crowd.

So, we had quite a bit of fun!

After the concert, we went back out to the festival grounds and listened to some more music — an odd mix that can be best called South Asian (almost bhangra) fusion. It was definitely sub-continent flavoured but it had a fiddle player. And an electric sitar. Anyway, it was incredibly dance-able, and both Gwen and Aidan did just that. Sorry about the photo — I wanted to capture the stage as well as Gwen and the boy, but unfortunately that put some “Surrey girls” in the centre of the photo, and you don’t really want a close-up.

Read Part I here

Still certain that Sunday was going to be poor weather, I spent a good portion of Saturday night trying to find cache listings that wouldn’t require too much slogging through muddy trails. So, we turned our attention to Richmond. The plan was to head out after Aidan’s nap, since the weather was supposed to clear up in the afternoon.

Well, Aidan didn’t have a nap on Sunday. Neither did it rain. Kind of yin and yang. At any rate, we left Vancouver in the early afternoon and headed down to the Richmond Nature Park. When we lived in Richmond we often drove by this park, but I had never gone in. Gwen had taken a few classes there though. Anyhow, the trails were dry, the sun beamed down on us and the birds were singing. Ah, yes, I’m familiar with this: mockery.

The trails were kinda fun. Bouncy! They traced their way over a peat bog and we were walking on what was probably several feet of the spongy stuff. Anyway, the cache was in the middle of the park, but we didn’t know which of the many trails to travel. The GPSr pointed us in the general direction, but we had to do some backtracking to get to the cache. Once there, Aidan made his first score of the day. Googooly eyes on a toddler-sized ring! We bounced our way back to the car and drove towards the dike.

There were a couple of caches near the dike at the end of the Westminster Highway. One was under a deck near a duck pond (ok, the oddly named “Terra Nova Natural Area”) that we didn’t know was there. It was an easy find, and Aidan made his second score of the day: a Jeep! Or, a dinky in the form of a Jeep. He laid down right there and then and rolled the jeep along the deck, googooly-eyed ring all but forgotten. The third cache of the day was right on the dike, at the base of a wall, covered by some stones and some tell-tale sticks. If you ever see several piles of stones, and only one has some sticks on it, you can be pretty sure someone’s buried a cache there. No goodies for Aidan in this cache, but it was fun all the same, if not for the view then for the most excellent clue. Gwen gets the credit for this excellent shot looking off towards Vancouver Island across the salt marsh:

The next cache was in Minoru Park (a park with an interesting history), yet another green space that we really didn’t know anything about. It is here in our story that the evil bunnies come out. I don’t know what it is about Richmond, but I can easily think of at least a half dozen places where you can go and observe rabbits living “in the wild”. Minoru Park is another such location. But look at these things! Pure evil:

You can tell their disposition from their eyes…

The cache was located beside a water feature that would have been a nice water fall if it wasn’t for all the pollen making the pond quite scummy. Bracketed on both sides by groups of teens, I think we stayed above suspicion from both them and various passer-bys. And then … we fell into the one-more-cache frame of mind. Between the five from Saturday and four from Sunday, we were having a pretty good weekend. One more would make a record weekend for us. The next cache on the list was in the park so we felt pretty good about making a personal best. We drove (yeah, I know) to the other end of the park and after a wrong turn into a fire station (don’t ask), we pulled into another parking lot. Nary a parking spot to be had, and another group of teens having what seemed to be a tail-gate party at the end of the parking lot. Right where Gwen was telling me the cache was within a few metre radius. So, for a second day in a row, muggles camping out on the cache kept us from the find. We thought about grabbing one more cache down in Steveston, and then considered going for groceries and grabbing the cache afterwards … but in the end, after the grocery shopping it was late enough that we knew that we had to get home to get the boy fed and to bed before we entered the danger zone of unchecked gag reflex.

Side notes: Three Road has been completely transformed. A couple of years ago, there was lots of road work as they widened it and ran a rapid-transit line down the centre of it. It was pretty messy but in the end, it was a pretty good improvement to the main drag in Richmond. Now, after several month’s work on the Canada Line, it’s back to being quite ugly. For one thing, most of the road is all torn up. For another thing, the Sky Train line isn’t running down the centre of the road — instead it’s off to the side. For another, the stark grey pillars have completely destroyed the aesthetics.

Also, we nabbed gas at $1.169 (less the bizarre 3.5¢ discount ‘at the pump’ that every station in the GVRD applies) and were strangely happy about it. I suppose it’s better than the $1.309 that it had been.

So, despite what we expected it was a banner weekend. Aidan gained several new toys (I think it’s time for us to contribute some of them back, plus we’re almost out of speckled frogs) and we got out and spent lots of time outside and in places we thought we knew but it turns out we didn’t know so well. Hope it doesn’t rain next weekend!

I hate it when plans don’t work out. It’s embedded in my personality I think. And, you know what’s crazy? The forecast on Friday was for a pretty miserable weekend, so I had planned (in my mind) for a pretty miserable weekend. And, wouldn’t you know it? It turned out to be a beautiful weekend. And in some small corner of my mind, I was irritated that things didn’t go as planned! Crazy.

Anyway, despite the expected miserableness, we planned to grab a few geocaches down in Stanley Park on Saturday (the expected better of the two days). If it was wet and cold, we’d go to the aquarium. As it turns out, it wasn’t. We grabbed four caches while strolling around the park in the morning. For the most part they were pretty easy but one of the caches, near the totem poles at the eastern end of the park, was pretty challenging. For one thing, it was out in the open — a magnetic micro cache attached to the back of a interpretive plaque. For another thing, there were somewhere between one and 10 million tourists milling about. Ok, maybe a little less, but there were seven (7!) tour busses parked at this particular spot. So how did we get the cache? Gwen went into Ninja Mode! With me shielding the plaque with Aidan and the stroller, she bent towards the cache and slipped the cache so stealthily from the back of the plaque that even I didn’t see her do it. We retreated through the throngs, logged our visit, and with equal casualness, Gwen replaced the cache like it had never been moved. Frankly, I was in awe. Here’s a shot near the cache of a Great Blue Heron doing some fishing. Stanley Park is home to more than 70 GBH nests.

The boy was getting pretty antsy and tired so we beat it back to the house for a nap. Well, that was the plan. First we stopped by the statue of Lord Stanley (sans Cup) because we were supposed to get a photo of the statue with the GPSr in frame in order to log one of the caches. Unfortunately the statue seemed to be the site of a drug deal, so Gwen took the photo from a distance.

And then, we thought we’d check out *one more cache* near the head of the Lion’s Gate. Unfortunately, I drove by the parking lot nearest the cache, and what with Stanley Park Drive being one-way only, we had to drive to the top of the hill (at Prospect Point). This wasn’t too bad; the cache was at the bottom of the hill (a 45m drop according to the topo in the GPS) so we got out and back-tracked down the trail. Some 10-15 minutes later we were at the bottom of the hill, milling about the inside of the hair-pin turn peering at one of the Real Big Trees. 5 or 10 minutes later, we were searching around in quiet desperation. See, I had left the PDA in the truck and so while we had the coordinates of the cache, we had nothing else. Purists will say that’s the way to do it, but we’re not purists. We don’t mind *easy*. Anyway, you can see where this is going. We didn’t find the cache, and went back up the trail empty handed, tails between our legs.

The drive out of the park was interesting. It was the first time since the Big Wind Storm (an extratropical cyclone that blew through in December) that we had drive through the western part of the park, and seen the amount of devastation of the forest there. It seemed incredible to see the huge tree trunks and blow-downs on the side of the road. And, to see West Van from the road.

Back to the house, time for a nap. After the nap … back to Stanley Park to grab the cache that we didn’t get! This time, we stopped at the correct parking lot, watched a cruise ship leave the harbour (there were 5 or 6 in or leaving port that day) and cross under the Lion’s Gate Bridge.

As you can see, I had Aidan in the backpack. He loves the backpack, but he doesn’t get to ride in it too often. Side note — like the haircut? You, of course, read about that on Gwen’s blog, right?

Well, it took us about 5 minutes to walk to the hairpin (on level ground) and less than 5 minutes to find the cache. In fact, Gwen walked right to it.

Buoyed by our success, we wandered drove down to First Beach to grab *one more cache*. This one was also within easy reach, but unfortunately there was someone sleeping on the bench that we think we were supposed to be looking around/under. Darned muggles.

Hmmmm, it’s late. And I’m almost totally engrossed in watching Jamie Foxx on Inside the Actor’s Studio. What an incredibly intelligent, charismatic, and engaging man. A little later in the week, I’ll serve up “One More Cache: Part II, or In Richmond, Bunnies are Evil.”

On Friday we went out for fish and chips. As an aside, “our” fish and chips place has gone through a number of ownership changes, some good, some bad. The lastest owners/managers are of South Asian descent. When we first started going there, it was owned/run by some Newfoundlanders. At the time it was called “The Windjammer Inn” and had an appropriately “English” fish-and-chips decor. It’s now called “The Winjjammer Inn”. The decor hasn’t changed in the least. And, frankly, the fish and chips is better than it has been in some time.

Anyway, as we were completing our meal, a couple of older ladies seated behind us finished their meal and had to walk by us to leave. One of the ladies, hunched over and using a walker, stopped by the table and exchanged some words with Aidan. She had a nice soft voice with a quaint Irish lilt. As she left the restaurant, Aidan turned to her and yelled in his gentle voice, “Bye-bye Granny!”. He repeated it again, just for her benefit.

Granny is, of course, what we’ve taught Aidan to call his great-grandmother — also short, grey haired, and with an Irish lilt. It was quite cute.

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Today, we got an unexpected phone call from Gwen’s uncle Paul. He and his wife Jeanette were in town visiting her sister down in White Rock and wanted to get together. So, we frantically cleaned the house. Fortunately we were in good shape, having cleaned (and vacuumed!) most of the upstairs yesterday. We had a good visit and walked to Red Robin for some mid-afternoon lunch. Aidan missed his afternoon nap and was predictibly wound up. Fortunately, in a good way — hyper and restless, but not cranky.Aidan was pretty friendly with both, warming up pretty quickly. In fact so warm, that he happily brought Jeanette books to read and deposited himself in her lap, and climbed all over Paul. He was very much in their face, but I don’t think they minded in the least.

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Not much geocaching this weekend; we tried some yesterday but only got one. The main reason was that the boy was pretty cranky and we were having a hard time keeping him occupied and happy while we searched for caches. Plus, it’s been pouring rain all weekend. Maybe we’ll pick up a couple tomorrow.