Family Visit - A Great End to the Summer

I am way overdue on some updates to the website. It’s been a crazy fall with work, and I haven’t had the bandwidth to work on processing photos and getting the web site updated. It’s likely to take some time to get through them still.

The focus is going to be on getting an update from some great family visits that happened at the beginning of September. Shawn and family flew out to spend a few days with us before Mom and Dad arrived from their cross-Canada road trip. That gave us a couple of days to catch up and tour around Vancouver before our ferry to Galiano on Wednesday morning.

The family arrived Monday around lunch time, and got settled into the Granville Island Hotel. That was a great location, as the hotel was super-close to where Justine and I are, and we could easily coordinate our couple of days of local trips. We didn’t have a huge amount of time Monday afternoon, so we headed over to Stanley Park to see if we could get into the Aquarium. Sadly, the new COVID policies meant you needed to book online and couldn’t just walk up and buy a ticket.

Mackenzie outside the Aquarium

We went out for a quick walk around the area and checked out the totem poles and sea wall. The weather was nice, and it was good to be able to catch up, after having not seeing anyone in person for so long!

After Justine got done with her work day, we met for dinner and had some pizza. We wrapped up the day relatively early with a quick visit at our place. Tuesday was going to be a big day, so we wrapped things up and called it a night.

The main attraction of our day was a visit to the Britannia Mining Museum

Mom and Dad arrived on Sunday night and after spending Monday getting settled, met us at the Granville Island Hotel to head out for our day. It was an early start, as we had tickets for the Britannia Mining Museum for the 9:30 a.m. entry. The drive up the Sea to Sky was quite nice, and we were up at the museum with lots of time to spare. Eventually we got let in and headed up for the tour of the mine.

The Mining Museum is a great venue, and I’d highly recommend it to anyone visiting Vancouver.

The first part of the tour is a great little train ride into the mountain. They take you in a short distance, then show you how the mine used to work, including some of the tools that they used back in the day when the mine was operational. One of the fun things is that they shut the lights off and you get to experience the true darkness of a mine without lights. It’s pretty cool.

After the mine tour, we headed into the main mine building. They have a new exhibit called “Boom!” an interactive exhibit that provided great insight into the operations at the mine. It’s set-up in the main mine building and you get a real appreciation of the scale of the place. The exhibit is quite cool, and a great addition to the facility.

We had a busy day - from Vancouver, up to Britannia Beach, Squamish and Shannon Falls, before heading back to North Vancouver for a trip up Grouse Mountain.

They did a great job of explaining the process of how the material mined from the tunnels was broken down and processed using gravity in the mine building. It crazy how many stages the ore is processed through to get the final end result.

After completing the “formal” part of the tours we spent another hour or so wandering about the grounds and checking out the other exhibits.

One of things they really stressed was all the environmental clean up they have done since about 2000, cleaning up the toxic material that leeches out of the mine and that had been contaminating Howe Sound.

The kids had fun panning for “gold” - they did find lots of cool rocks - and there were lots of other interesting things to see.

I particularly like the core samples - the samples drilled from the rock that they use to determine the direction to expand the mine. There’s an entire building of them, still sitting there as if they were just pulled out of the earth.

As this mine produced some crazy percentage of all the copper produced in North America for a very long time, there was a whole exhibit on copper and its use down through the ages. Very interesting stuff.

After a while it was time to call it a visit. We browsed the gift shop for a bit before heading off on our way. We headed further North, up to Squamish where we stopped for some lunch - we had to give them the White Spot experience.

After we finished up lunch, the kids had decided they wanted to see Grouse Mountain, so we headed back south. We made a short stop at Shannon Falls to see the waterfall. It's a great spot, and always worth a stop. The water level was very low, given that we haven’t had rain in two months.

We got to Grouse Mountain fairly early in the afternoon. The weather wasn’t great - some light rain and clouds, and it was colder than I would have liked. But there is lots to see and do up at the “Peak of Vancouver”. We went out on the deck to catch the view of the city, watched a bit of the lumberjack show (where of course, one of the lumberjacks was from Orangeville…) and then watched the bears for a little while. There was lots of other wildlife around as well.

With the cool weather, the bears were quite active. They were out in the pools, and wandering around the habitat. Lane also spotted a small herd of deer that were grazing the rich grass on the ski slopes.

And no, the deer were not in with the bears! The little fawns were safe.

The kids have some growing to do to catch the bears…

The last event of the day was an owl show. They had two owls - a barn owl and a great horned owl. The trainer gave a good talk, and after the show they let the kids get up close and personal with the two birds.

We had a great day, with quite a few different little adventures. We wrapped the day, with the plan to head to Galiano on Wednesday!