Bridal Veil Falls, Revisited

Over the past several years I have made a priority of visiting the places I grew up and pushing myself to look at these places from new perspectives, pushing myself out of my routine and comfort zone. Initially I was hesitant to try new things or try old things with a fresh perspective. I felt my prior experience could sufficiently inform my present. I discovered these new experiences weren't replacing my old ones, but enriching them.

Growing up in and near Vancouver, B.C. there are so many opportunities to get close to nature that you can take them for granted. I have so many memories of driving from British Columbia's Southern Interior back home to the Fraser Valley after visiting family. I remember all of the signs along the Trans-Canada Highway vividly. Despite passing it at least one hundred times, I only stopped at Bridal Veil Falls twice--once with my parents and once on a school field trip.

On this day in September 2017, the weather was classic Pacific Northwest. A good soaking rain fell for hours and the convertible top on our rental car had to stay up. I wanted to stop at the falls but also I didn't really want to get wet. I kept mentally pushing off the decision to pull off the highway for x more miles or x more minutes. At the last possible second I definitively decided that we would go. It was just rain, just water coming from the sky. If we got soaked we could get dry again.

Grudgingly, I got out of the car and my husband and I started up the steep trail to the falls. The rain was relentless. But after a few minutes, the hour or so of agonizing uncertainty was forgotten. I was listening to the forest. I was reconciling fond memories of being a kid with the present reminder of how splendid the rain forest is.

The falls were more beautiful than I had remembered. The memories I had stored turned out to have little to do with the falls but the events surrounding the visits. This time, I would hold onto the memory of the falls, the smell of the forest, the sound of the falls tumbling down the mountain, and the rain drops bouncing off of leaves and branches.

Truthfully, while I know I must've been soaked when we got back to the car and I can picture myself changing shoes in the parking lot, chasing the experience with a Teen Burger, onion rings, and a root beer a little further down the road in Hope seemed to effectively erase those frustrations.

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 46^th 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.

Neighbors

In the past week two Canadian soldiers have been murdered, not while serving overseas, but in Canada. One after being run down in a parking lot in Quebec and the other shot down while guarding the War Memorial in Ottawa yesterday (then the suspect continued into Parliament where he was taken down). I suspect the individual identities of these soldiers were irrelevant to the respective killers, but they were individuals who made a calculated career choice: to voluntarily protect the country and way of life they love. This same decision and these same sentiments are echoed every day by thousands of other soldiers in Canada. This is a noble vocation.

As a Canadian, but also a US permanent resident who currently primarily lives in the United States, I have substantial ties in both countries and when such tragedies take place on either side of the border, it is upsetting.

But my heart has been warmed by the concern and outpouring of support by our American cousins. One of the MPs from the NDP explained it very well on TV last night. Sometimes our American neighbors are a little rowdy and exciting to live next to, but we wouldn’t care to share a border with anyone else. And some pessimists may go straight to thinking it is strictly for defense reasons but, seriously, it isn’t.

When I saw friends on Facebook posting messages of concern and support for those in Ottawa it warmed my heart.

Likewise, it made me feel at home when I saw my American friends very sincerely hoping those guilty for executing such terrible crimes are brought to justice swiftly and severely.

When I learned of grander and more public events of support, such as the singing of O Canada at the Penguins game last night, it really did it for me.

Americans really do make the best neighbors.