Day 9 (7/19) – Having spent more than a week on the road we were now out of clean clothes. I had hoped to find ourselves at a hotel with guest laundry available (either self-serve, or possibly willing to splurge on a service), but that hadn’t happened yet. The hotel on day 8 did have a guest laundry facility, but it was out of service. And here, the Blue Horizon, has a laundry service, but it only operates Monday through Friday and we needed clean clothes sooner than Monday evening.
So I packed up all the dirty laundry into two duffel bags and carried them a half-mile to a laundromat when it opened at 9:30. Fairly nice walk, much of the way was streets that had been closed to vehicle traffic and had trees. Got there early enough to grab two washers–which fit all the laundry with room to spare. With the washers running I walked next door to a cafe for breakfast. My order flag was this classic T-rex toy:
By the time I finished breakfast it was time to move the laundry. On the washers you pay for a wash cycle, but for the dryers you just buy 3 minutes per quarter. So I asked the attendant how long a full load usually takes to dry. She told me about 40 minutes, but it’s a good thing I didn’t listen to her. I put them each in for 27 and they were both almost entirely dry. So I combined the few things that were still damp for another 12 minutes while I folded everything else.
By this time I found myself as the new resident expert on their machines and was helping other people get their laundry going. The machines were…not obvious in their functioning and very often spit back quarters or had quarters get stuck and you’d need to smash the reject button several times to get it to spit out.
Anyway, laundry washed, folded, and loaded back up into the duffel bags for the half-mile walk back to the hotel. The girls had gotten up and eaten breakfast from the bin and with fresh laundry everyone was dressed and ready for lunch. For which we stopped at the new bakery on the corner next to the hotel and split a chocolate croissant, a caramel almond pastry, and a sourdough baguette.
From there we did a little walking tour of the city. First stop the Vancouver Public Library – Central Branch because it’s an interesting building:
Then on to the Gastown Steam Clock, which plays Westminster Chimes via steam whistles! I somehow missed that information when looking it up, so it was a fun surprise. We caught the 1:30 chimes and then looked around at some shops and ate some donuts to await the top of the hour:
More walking to reach Science World (currently dressed up as a soccer ball for the World Cup). The girls had a blast. Lots interactive displays–in working order!
One favorite was the generative-AI system which was seeded with your motion. You could select a prompt as to what kind of images to generate. The girls preferred the kittens and the flowers.
And the other big hit was the responsive, Winter wonderland room. It also responded to your movement with ice-skate tracks, blowing snow, and such.
We closed down the museum and our legs and feet were shot. Fortunately, there was a SkyTrain stop just outside which we would get us to ~2/5 of a mile from the hotel. Showing my American-centric viewpoint, in planning the trip I hadn’t even looked at intra-city rail options for getting around. So it was a nice shortcut to take and straightforward to use. Though Jess somehow lost her ticket in the 3 stops we took and had to buy another one to get out.
The girls were beat at this point and ate dinner from the bin and rested their legs. I went for a walk and had a slice of pizza for dinner. Then rested my legs and feet in the hot tub for a little while. Sunset from the hotel window:
