Walks, Caches, and Gravy

As it happens, the amount of time it takes for you to enjoy being with your family to being driven nuts is about a week. After days became more unnerving than fun, I needed to breakaway for a little bit: a reset.

I walked to the mall. I know, so often we transportation and planning types talk about how malls generate so much vehicular traffic and how they do not always encourage active communities, but Lougheed Mall, I think, will always manage to get by, even if it is not the biggest, nicest, or newest because of the enormous number of domiciles within walking distance, coupled with the fact the SkyTrain station located there is emerging as a hub.

The mall had several things to offer me. First, a nice, quiet 10 minute walk was really good for me. Second, I found a geocache in the parking lot (a small, superficial victory). And, most importantly, there are many purveyors of poutine in the food court.

I elected to go with New York Fries. While they will gussy up their poutine with additional ingredients, I am a big fan of their gravy. It is a little bit thinner than what you will find at A&W and KFC, but it is darker and has a richer flavor. As the name of the establishment would suggest, they also have out-of-this-world fries.

While this reprieve did not change my frustration or ease my homesickness (I might be from British Columbia, but home is where the cats are—and the cats are in West Virginia), it was much needed time to organize my thoughts and formulate plans for getting through the next few days.

Hair

After skipping the salon for about five years I finally decided my hair was something worth caring better for. Though I found it amazing how my hair just naturally stopped growing right at about my shoulders and it had a nice wave, sometimes even a curl to it—with no more maintenance than just daily shampooing and conditioning. But I watched and listened while Jenn had her hair cut by her lifelong hairdresser in Beaver, PA about a month earlier and realized that maybe it was time.

Here, on the opposite side of the continent, hair was the avenue of a homecoming. I took a seat in the chair in front of the woman who cut my hair twenty years earlier. I must say, I like having my hair cut more now because I get to make all of the decisions. Just like watching Jenn’s haircut, it was a fine choreography of combs, scissors, and pinched hands. It was a pleasant ritual and the results were wonderful, so similar to before yet so different. More than anything, it is just a little easier to pass a comb through.

To celebrate the trimmed tresses we made tracks for De Dutch, which is a Dutch themed breakfast and lunch restaurant. I’ve never found anything like it except for the small chain in the Lower Mainland of British Columbia. Their signature item is pannekoek, a large and extremely thin pancake, is used in virtually every dish in masterful ways. My sweet tooth in overdrive, I ordered one covered in strawberries and whipped cream.

Lady Liberty

The holiday season having begun in Canada the previous Monday, few places seemed better for a nice dinner with my parents than the Pantry. Besides, the quiet atmosphere and scent of gravy is good for a migraine.

After dinner, my mom and I took a short walk and found a small surprise around the corner.

Indeed, that is a miniature Statue of Liberty. It is visible from the westbound Trans-Canada Highway near the overpass at North Road in Coquitlam.

A Day from the Past

How this day unfolded was not intentional, but it ended up being an opportunity to revisit three different periods of my life. I suppose one of the benefits to not sticking around the same place forever is that the people and places that are familiar and remind you of that place have this way of always being significant in that context, regardless of how much they change.

In the morning, I set out to find three geocaches near the Cameron Branch of the Burnaby Public Library (one of them was inside the library!). When I was really young and my parents wanted a vacation, they’d let me stay with my grandmother for anywhere from a weekend to a week or so. One of my favorite things to do with my grandma when I was a kid was to feed the ducks at the small pond off of Cameron St, about a 15 minute walk from her apartment building. I think when I was about 8 or 9 they ended up filling in the pond, but when I’m lucky enough to come across one of the old pictures of the pond, it always makes me smile. While we had driven past the area numerous times on the trip, it was nice to get out and walk between the caches near the Rec Center and just think about these old times and take in some of the new developments in the area, such as some really neat dragons.

 

One of the dragons near the Cameron Rec CenterI strongly recommend the How dewey find it? 2 – Cameron Branch and 10-10-10 Here Be Dragons! geocaches, they really highlight some of the best features of the Cameron Recreation Complex and if you’ve ever spent time there, it’s bound to bring back some memories.

Later on, I met up with Jason. Jason and I attended grades 1 through 7 together, there was only one year that we were not in the exact same class. So we have strong memories of each other from when we were really young. It is so remarkable how little has changed about who we are as individuals, even though so much has obviously changed. We’re adults, forging paths for ourselves in the world now. In elementary school neither of us had very many friends, so we are effectively each other’s time capsules. Though he has done far better keeping up with the news of our classmates than I have, so it really does take a delicious spaghetti dinner, at the New Westminster location of the Old Spaghetti Factory, to scratch the surface of what has become a nearly-annual tradition. More than anything, it is just nice to remember that while we struggled in elementary school, we made it, and we’re proof of that.

A short SkyTrain ride back toward where I was staying, I met up with Mairi. She was my first and best friend during my freshman year of college, which was absolutely the most challenging. What was funniest is that while we met at Lougheed Mall, which was a common place for us to go in college, she had not been there in years, either. We had decided to meet at the Starbucks.

Prior to meeting up, my dad asked me if I knew where the Starbucks was. I said that it was near the McDonald’s and I was adamant about this. My dad was less confident and was trying to explain where it was. It turns out that the McDonald’s is long gone. What was once a McDonald’s is now an urban clothing store, but when I explained the story to Mairi she said, “If you had said it was by the McDonald’s, I would’ve known exactly where you meant!” So the mall had changed since 2004-2005, but our knowledge of the mall had not, even though my dad’s knowledge had because he can see the mall from his apartment and probably visits it on a monthly basis.

I had not seen Mairi in about five years but as soon as we started talking it was like no time had passed at all. In fact, it felt like we could just have easily been back in 2004 and heading back to our dorm at Simon Fraser University later that night. It was so exciting to learn that she’s getting married, is successful at a wonderful job, and is generally rocking at life. While I could have probably ascertained some of this via Facebook or through some other online media, it was much better to hear it over coffee at one of our old haunts.

But with the ending of the day, so does the portal to the past. 2014 returns tomorrow.

Mundy Park

Maintaining my focus on outdoor activities and desiring a good walk, I looked up geocaching opportunities in Mundy Park. Mundy Park is a 178-hectare park in Coquitlam featuring a number of wonderful trails and amenities. The city is not exaggerating when they refer to the park as a treasured asset, despite being in the heart of an urban community it does not take long to feel as if you are in a remote forest.

Because I was not familiar with this park, I attribute my success at navigating the park with relative ease to snapping a photo of the trail map on my way in. I referred to it a lot because I ended up seeking five caches and there were many intersecting trails. I wanted to be efficient in my efforts. I also did not want to give in and have to pay horrendous cellular data rates (U.S. cell companies can be ruthless on cell data when you’re visiting Canada).

Mundy Park Trail Map

The first cache I sought was a letterbox hybrid type, A Walk in the Park. These types can be neat because when they are executed as intended, the coordinates take you close-ish and then you follow written directions to get to the cache itself. Doing that took me on a nice walk, I considered it orientation. The other characteristic of the letterbox hybrid is that they ordinarily have a stamp in them and some individuals collect impressions of these stamps. It combines the hobbies letterboxing and geocaching.

The last cache I sought in the park was a tribute to a former cache, Vancouver Transit. Vancouver Transit was a locationless cache. That is, it moved around. In this case, the intention was to move it to places in the Greater Vancouver area that were transit-friendly. This is awesome to be because 1) I love transit and 2) this amazing park is actually transit friendly. The cache I found in the park was placed to memorialize the 46th location that Vancouver Transit was placed. 

Five Caches in Burnaby

I always though Monday was a much nicer day for Thanksgiving. I also thought October was a nicer month for holidays. Then again, the worst of winter comes and goes much sooner in Greater Vancouver than it does in West Virginia (our coldest days linger around late January, which was a rude awakening when in the Vancouver area they tend to be in December). What I am getting at is, despite some light drizzle and greyness, the weather was quite pleasant on this day so I toured Burnaby with caches.

GC4AK9P – Destination Moon

This one had been on my radar for some time as I had failed to find it on a previous trip. In retrospect, our errors were errors of ignorance (despite the fact I spent a year at the nearby institution of higher education). The cache is a little bison tube hidden next to something I could see from my grandma’s (and now my dad’s) apartment for my entire life so it has that extra cool factor. Someone also left a whole bunch of baseball caps neatly lined up on a park bench next to the area of the cache. What is up with that?

 

Pretty hats all in a rowGCV3CW – Dukes of Haszard

I was nearly stumped by this cache. So nearly stumped. The dampness of the ground and the large, unfamiliar insects of the area kind of gross me out so I had held out on seeking caches in specific areas (areas that also seemed out of place for a cache with such a low terrain rating). When I swallowed my pride and accepted the fact I didn’t have my husband around to do the gross stuff, I came up with the hide. I also realized that having a cache of surgical gloves would give me some wonderful peace of mind when touching some caches, little insects can gross me out too. What was awesome about this cache is that it took you to an urban creek that doubles as a fish habitat.

GC59CV1 – Monte-See Monte-DO

This little park was neat, it was surrounded almost entirely by the rear side of some medium-density apartments, sort of garden style. The challenge in placing a cache here is two-fold: there are many eyes here and all of the buildings (and all of the trees!) do not make gathering a set of accurate coordinates easy. A local resident spotted me poking around and he came right out and asked me what I was doing. I am always 100% honest, I explain that I am participating in what is sort of like a global scavenger hunt and one of the game pieces is hidden nearby. The gentleman then explained that he knew where it was, pointed me in the direction of it, and then asked me another question: does it have anything to do with drugs? And of course I said, NO! Absolutely not! Though I have often wondered if it had that appearance to those uninvolved—I think I just got my answer.

GC4DRPX – Squint Or You May Miss It

I have years of experience with Burnaby, yet this is an enormous park that I had never heard of! Hooray for geocaching! Without this cache, who knows how many more years would have passed and I would have never known about this really, really nice park. It never hurts to know about another park. What I loved about this cache is that it was easily accessible, yet it was still down a nice wooded trail. Truthfully, one of the things I liked most about this trip out west that I wish I saw more of in Morgantown was nicely developed wooded trails. I feel like the only time they bother with such things here is if they used to be a railroad.

GC48GEH – Home Sweet Home!

Around my parts, in West Virginia, a cache like this would be in a bird house. Apparently in the Vancouver area they take on a different meaning. Thankfully, when the coordinates zero’d out (coupled with the description clearly indicating some places that the cache was NOT hidden) there was only one logical hiding place. The hide was not all that interesting, but it made me think about how there really are some mild regional dialects to geocaching and that that is really cool.

Morning with Nature, Evening with the Almighty

I slept so well, from 7:30pm to… 5:30am. The bed wasn’t particularly comfortable and the room kind of smelled. I was so tired that it just did not matter (and sometimes this is just part and parcel of staying in spare rooms with family). I was up so early that I showered and bored myself with the internet before my host did as much as stir. Oh, jet lag.

We went to breakfast, which felt like lunch, at the Plaza Café, which is in the shadow of the construction of the new Evergreen (SkyTrain) Line (the segment along Clarke Rd). It seems like in Canada there are so many more restaurants that combine different types of food, here virtually everything seemed to have a Greek flair, even though it was a diner. This place may have been my favorite breakfast spot of the trip, I came back twice for their Big Mess.

Afterward, knowing that my afternoon and evening would evolve into a hectic time, I wanted to spend some time at Burnaby Lake Regional Park. Burnaby Lake Regional Park is a true urban oasis. It offers open water for Simon Fraser University’s rowing club to practice, migratory birds to pause on their routes, and a place close to home for the urban dwellers of Greater Vancouver to get in touch with nature. Much of the reason the area has managed to stave off development is that the land surrounding the lake is very soft and marshy. No complaints here.

CN on the mainline, heading toward downtown Vancouver

As we pulled up, a train passed by. I took this as a good omen. I then took to finding the geocaches I had made it my goal to seek. I so thoroughly enjoyed running around all of the trails, relatively proximal to where I parked, off Piper Ave. The weather was cool and threatening to rain, but it was perfect for this kind of activity. Though perhaps the best part of this trip was walking out onto the short pier into the lake, fulfilling the requirements for the Earthcache, and looking at all of the different types of ducks called the lake home, I saw plenty of mallards but then there were numerous ducks that, if they weren’t in the general shape, I’d have never recognized. An older Scottish gentleman saw me ogling some of the birds and taught me how to identify some of them. He explained that this year was actually not a particularly good one in terms of diversity but you could’ve fooled me. I think I liked the wood ducks the most, for both their sound and their coloring.

Of course, I enjoyed the nature portion of the day too long. These things happen. I had to drop off one parent to pick up the other and then rush out to the airport to pick up a friend of my mother. My mom had decided to join the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Now, we had to hurry to the airport to pick up the first missionary she had ever really connected with, Misty, who she’d known for 12 years.

I never drove in Vancouver. I moved to California when I was 13. I lived in the Vancouver area for a year when I was 17-18, but I was in college with a bus pass that was included in tuition. I never had to drive. Here I was, trying to get to the airport, in a car with Imperial units (my dad brought his car with him when he moved from California), but in a country that uses metric, with a fairly good idea how to get there but not an exact idea (and no help from my mother who has lived in the Vancouver area for about 30 years but thinks that because she doesn’t drive it’s fine to not know how to get around). Amazingly, despite the initial delay and ending up on a frontage road instead of the main road, we got there a few minutes early. Hooray! And driving in Vancouver did not feel much different from driving in an unfamiliar American city or state, after a few minutes I adjusted.

We made it back with time to change into nice clothes and head toward the church for my mother’s baptism: 7pm, sharp. I am not a member of this church but my mother asked me to come to support her decision so I felt it was the right thing to do. Plus, at this exact moment in time, I had a bit of a lull in activity regarding my dissertation.

The church was brimming with activity when we arrived. One of the members had just returned from serving a mission in Argentina and they were celebrating her return. It seemed like a good night for my mother to be initiated into the Church. The baptism and ceremony were lovely, and are her story to tell. I can merely say that it was lovely and if the individuals I met were any indication of this ward at large, she will be well taken care of.

After the evening of hymns and testimony, Misty, the old missionary friend, had one request: to visit a Tim Horton’s. They don’t have Timmy’s in Idaho. Apparently, it takes the skilled hands of a Canadian to make the best maple bars. A vanilla iced with a hot French Vanilla was exactly what I needed to wind down and relax before another night of serious sleeping.

Conquering the Pacific Northwest: Power

After so many early mornings and hundreds of miles, sleeping in at my mother’s place felt like heaven. We slept in until about 9:00am. For us, this is sleeping in. Eventually we got the whole family together: mom, dad, grandma, Chris and I. Our Mustang not having five seatbelts, we all squeeze into my dad’s Ford Focus wagon and went to Denny’s. After breakfast Chris and I went our own way, to the bakery section of a nearby supermarket. Chris and I had an important date to celebrate.

Meanwhile, my mother was preparing one of her signature meals. After getting everything over to my grandma’s place and eating, it was time for dessert. I put the cake on the table and three sets of eyes were quizzically looking at the cake wondering what “one month” meant. There were no correct guesses. Chris and I let my family know that we got married exactly a month before. My mother ran to the bathroom crying, my dad had a stunned look on his face, and the smile on my grandmother’s face was a mile wide. Overall, the reception was good. Later on my mother confirmed that they were tears of happiness once she got over being so mad that we had not told her sooner, especially considering she had visited me in Pennsylvania for about two weeks, arriving three days after Chris and I were married by a judge at the courts in Morgantown, WV.

With a single full day remaining in Canada, Chris and I had to decide what the perfect day would be. We unanimously decided that De Dutch was the only place we could even consider getting breakfast. There is nothing like getting multiple types of meat in addition to eggs served on top of a pancake the size of a large dinner plate. Their location in Burnaby on Hastings is hidden on the lower level of the back side of a non-descript commercial building. It’s never overwhelmingly busy, but that’s fine by us!

After gorging on food Chris and I decided to visit the Stave Falls Power Plant.  The visitor’s center at this old hydroelectric facility is a hidden gem in the Lower Mainland. There are two hydro facilities at Stave Falls. One of them is brand new and generating power, the other is a facility that is about 100 years old, made obsolete by the new facility. Unlike tours of currently operational hydro facilities, guests are able to get up close to the controls and machinery at old Stave. If you’re really interested in how hydroelectricity is generated this is where you need to go.

The tour is self-guided, but begins with a video explaining how rain is a great thing (sometimes you need this reassurance in the Pacific Northwest!) because of the power it provides. This is followed by a gallery of interactive exhibits illustrating the history of electricity and municipal power systems. I particularly enjoyed the interactive exhibit where I had to connect different components of an electric transmission system to move power from the plant to homes.

After learning about the history of electricity and electricity transmission, visitors turn a corner and are suddenly in a great hall, the heart of where the power of water turns into the power in your home. Here visitors are above the generation equipment and it is impossible not to feel small among equipment capable of such power. In the distance on this upper level are rows of controls, manufactured by Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, that were staffed by numerous individuals around the clock before computerization, to manage the equipment on the lower level.

The view entering the great hall, the generators on the level below

On the lower level there is a door that takes guests onto a patio showing the old penstocks. It is difficult to get a sense of the size of the pipes feeding water into the electric generating equipment, but an employee did a wonderful job of expressing not only the size and magnitude of the pipes, but the sound of the water rushing through them. Returning indoors we mingled with equipment that was impressively immense. Simply the thought of how all of these materials made it to this, relatively, remote lake a century ago was amazing.

This is where the power was made, and this is how close you can get to it

Finally, there is another exhibit hall filled with artifacts of the early days of B.C. Hydro. This stroll down memory lane elicits feelings of nostalgia even in people too young to remember the old trolley cars, advertisements, and logos of the utility that enabled Vancouver’s development into a world-class city. Of the three hydro facility tours I have done this year: Grand Coulee Dam (Coulee Dam, WA), Stave Falls (Mission, BC), and Sir Adam Beck 2 (Niagara Falls, ON), Stave is by far the best and absolutely worth the $6 admission.

Transportation, Light, Heat, and Power

This winds down our final day in Canada. Tomorrow, the journey home begins. But remember, no vacation is over until you’ve paid for your airport parking.

Conquering the Pacific Northwest: Life Along the Mighty Fraser

Leaving Merritt we headed west through the Indian reservations and we took a side road to the location of the Craigmont Mine. My maternal grandfather worked at this mine that appeared to be coming back to life after being shuttered for some years. Also memorializing the mine is a geocache, hidden by a tourism organization intending to highlight the history of British Columbia’s Gold Country. I think it comes as a surprise to many how much mining has contributed to the development of British Columbia, even though it does not hold the same significance to locals as, say, coal mining is significant to West Virginians. I digress.

We continued on to Spence’s Bridge where we met up with the Trans-Canada Highway we left behind the day before near Shushwap Lake. From here we follow the last miles of the Thompson River into Lytton, where we stopped to observe the confluence of the Fraser and Thompson Rivers. Here the clear blue Thompson flows into the slower, muddier Fraser.

The blue water of the Thompson giving into the muddy water of the Fraser River

Beyond Lytton, the Trans-Canada embarks through the treacherous Fraser Canyon, so narrow at points that the highway had to be built in the river that carved out the narrow passage.

Somehow we largely managed to miss the most egregious tourist traps on this journey, but we made an exception at the Hell’s Gate Airtram. Here gondola cars transport tourists from one side of the Fraser to the other in a treacherous narrows defined by deadly rapids that had always been present, but were made worse due to some dynamite-happy railroad builders. A bridge near the bottom of the narrow gorge with an open-grate deck tests the fortitude of the strongest stomachs. No worry, the fudge shop sells plenty of sweets to ease the skittishness.

The Fraser River emerging from Hell's Gate

Only moments down the highway is the equally impressive but far less popular Alexandra Bridge. Here we left my parents at the parking area and Chris and I descended the narrow road, the road pre-dating the Trans-Canada, to the bridge built in 1926 that has sat quietly watching traffic on the bridge that replaced it in 1964.

Imagining travel on the Cariboo Road at Alexandra Road

In Hope we stopped for lunch and we planned our final stop, the Othello Tunnels. Access to the Othello Tunnels is off the new road between Hope and Merritt, the Coquihalla, it’s a modern, four-lane superhighway. For as long as I can remember, I had seen the signs for the tunnels at the exit. Finally, I had the opportunity to see them. Mom, Chris, and I made the short hike to the series of tunnels and bridges navigating the narrow canyon formed by the Coquihalla River. This would be the last time I would see that crystal turquoise water I had seen so much of during the previous few days.

The Othello Tunnels traversing the Coquihalla Canyon

From here, we followed the Lougheed Highway toward Coquitlam and watched as the narrow canyons and harsh rapids that had defined the Fraser River all day gave way to a broad, navigable river lined on both sides by agriculture. This part of the trip was quiet and it was beginning to sink in that the grand, wild road trip was over. We could sleep in tomorrow! Although we planned to stay put, Chris and I did have a surprised lined up. The end of the road trip did not mark the end of the vacation.