The weather turned rainy and gray in the morning. After puttering about, we walked to a nearby place for brunch: Rhizome Café. We got there a bit before opening… I appreciated the sign on the door that said the hours were “flexible”… so we walked about for a while.

Brunch was good. I had a garden omelette (which curiously did not seem to have any garden vegetables in it other than onions) with yams and potatoes and cornbread muffins. Amanda had some sort of Mexican inspired breakfast dish. The Kai had an apple pancake with more apples and other fruits. And we had some veggie patties. Amanda and I took turns running about with the Kai outside while we waited for our food.

The place was popular and filled up quickly. Good thing we got there when it opened.

We returned to the condo to get the stroller and walked to Science World which as one might expect from the name a science museum. It was pretty nice. We learned such facts like I weigh as much as a Bighorn Sheep, Amanda as much as a Komodo Dragon, and the Kai, well, as himself. The place proved very popular as a rainy day activity for the local kiddies. I had the gut feeling that the Ontario Science Center is better, but it has been a while since I had been there. The Kai got to play with a lot of things and hopefully became smarter.

We headed back to the condo for a quick lunch and the Kai’s nap. During said nap the weather taunted us by clearing up and becoming sunny for a bit, but that proved fleeting. When we woke the Kai up from his nap (he seemed to want to sleep for hours) it had already started to rain rather hard.

Since it was raining, we drove to Granville Island to check it out and see if it was worth going to tomorrow. The jury is still out on that question, though. I am unsure if the Kai would find it amusing, although really he finds most things amusing.

The rain let up a bit so we went to the nearby Vanier Park and walked about. There are a few museum-type points of interest here, but we got there a bit late to check them out, and walking in parks is always cheap and fun. The Kai got very very wet splashing about in puddles.

After a pit stop at the condo to change the Kai’s clothes, we went to dinner at another place nearby: the Wallflower, as self-described modern diner. We had chose it because we looked on Yelp for nearby places that were good for kids. I find eating out with the Kai stressful, so being good for kids is vital. As it turned out, I would not say the place is good for kids, at least for dinner, mainly because it has more of a bar/pub atmosphere.

However, I really liked the place otherwise. They had some neat art on the wall of ostrich heads and owls and dead birds. We had a mushroom bruschetta appetizer that was awesome. Amanda had some sort of spicy veggie burger with an outrageous amount of fries and I had a halibut fish and chips. Both were quite good. The Kai just ate our food like he normally does.

As an aside, I have been eating a lot of fish and chips recently. I have to lay off it for a while.

After dinner it was of course LK’s bedtime, so back to the condo we went. We needed to do some laundry as the Kai had burned through his clothes on this trip. The building has coin-operated washers on each floor, but we needed loonies, so I had to trek off to get change. That proved slightly challenging as it was late on a Sunday night and most places were closed, but I exchanged a couple of toonies (I wish the US had toonies) at a korean grocery that happened to still be open.

Amanda started the washer, although I am unsure what she used for detergent. Perhaps a bit of shampoo? Or perhaps nothing, as we had been reading that most people use 10x more soap than necessary and usually still have soap in their clothes after washing.

We idly watched TV to pass the evening, and Amanda quickly fell asleep after transferring the clothes to a dryer. When I checked up on them, the dryer was making a horrendous racket due to a couple of lip balms (many lip balms have been lost in our washers).I am surprised people didn’t turn the dryer off because it was freakin’ loud. But I removed the offending balms, watched more TV, retrieved and folded the clothes, and wrote this weblog entry.

2010.03.19 : FRIDAY
Amanda had to finish up some charts and we still had to pack for our trip to Vancouver, so we dropped off the Kai at school for the morning. Amanda finished up work whlie I cleaned the house and prepared things for the two cats (lots of food, water, and moving things around so that piglet piglet would not pee on important things).

We picked the Kai up around 11:30, which is right after he eats lunch and before his nap. We were hungry, and since we would be on the road for a while, we stopped at a Subway on Rainer for lunch before heading up north. After a couple of veggie subs (curiously, the Kai was starving even though he supposedly just had lunch) we got on I5 and headed for the border.

The border crossing was rather painless, although the five minute wait stated by a sign was really more like 25 minutes. Amanda and LK got out of the car while I was waiting in line and jumped back in right before we talked to the border person (who seemed like she was 18).

While waiting I disabled all the network things on my iPhone. I do not have an international plan, so using my phone for anything would cost major amounts of money. Theoretically, though, WIFI is free, so I can still use it if an open access point is around. And I can still use it to take pictures.

We stopped at the visitor center to use the facilities and to change a lot of money. We needed a lot of cash to pay for condo that we are renting; before we left Amanda tried to pay for it using Paypal, but she had issues. I used to simply use my credit card since I got the best exchange rate without any fees, but nowadays, everyone charges “foreign transaction fees”. Changing money at a typical currency place is a wash with using my ATM card; the worse rates for using a currency place is equivalent to the 1% transaction fee plus network ATM fees when using a bank card.

We found the condo that we rented without much trouble. We were early for picking up the keys, so we relaxed at a park nearby. We met with one of the condo owners (Jamie?) and he gave us the the rundown. It was a one bedroom place one the second floor of a building fairly close to downtown. Nice, really, and better than a hotel.

We went to a nearby grocery store to pick up some supplies and had a fajita dinner. After the Kai went to bed we just watched some TV.

I had a bad night as I was coughing a lot and had a slight fever. I slept on one of the sofas to keep from waking up the progeny.

2010.03.20 : SATURDAY
Amanda made a pancake bfast while I tried to keep the Kai from smearing blueberries everywhere. I felt pretty crappy but was energized after a morning shower.

We then headed out to Stanley Park to visit the Vancouver Aquarium. We had been talking up the beluga whales to the Kai for a long time.

I had major problems paying for parking; the little kiosk thing refused to take all of our coins. Eventually I just used a credit card.

The aquarium was fun. There were two baby belugas with their mothers. Since we got there right when the aquarium opened, we had the huge room by the beluga tanks all to ourselves. It was cool to relax there with no one around watching the whales swim about.

It was fun at the aquarium, and I remembered a lot from the last time we were there a few years ago. I was smaller than I recalled, though. We had lunch and stayed for the beluga show, although that pushed the Kai’s naptime back. It was a very sedate show since the baby belugas were still young and the mothers were tired from caring for them.

We headed back to the condo for the Kai’s nap, but he ended up only sleeping fifteen or so minutes in the car and refused to sleep at the condo.

We headed back to Stanley Park to check out the chidren’s farmyard. The Kai enjoyed looking and petting the domestic animals (chickens, goats, sheep, rabbits, guinea pigs, llamas, etc.). We let him burn off energy at a nearby playground before heading back for dinner.

We stopped by the grocery and liquor store (booze is sold in separate businesses in BC) to pick up some wine, bread, chocolate snacks (“I need chocolate snack please” said the Kai), and olives. We wanted some cheese, but it was outrageously expensive. The wine was expensive, too, but we were on vacation.

We had a pasta dinner with wine and whatnot. It was tasty, although my sense of taste was a bit screwed up from my illness. We put the Kai to sleep early. Now Amanda is watching The Devil Wears Prada while I type out this entry.