SEATTLE - When I was expecting my first child, it seemed I couldn’t take a step without someone, be it friends, family, neighbours, co-workers, passersby, mailmen or observant vagabonds, informing me my life was about to change — forever!
“Enjoy your time now! Get your sleep,” they would say, eyeing my growing belly.
Then my baby girl was born, and my life was changed — instantly, violently, beautifully.
For four months our family lived by the ticking of the clock and God forbid we should waiver. No meals out, no drinks with friends, just my husband, my baby and that good old tick tock.
By the six-month mark, though, it was time for a vacation. Our escape: The Pacific Northwest.
I read up on famous Portland food trucks, put on some vinyl from the Seattle music scene of my youth — Nirvana, Pearl Jam, Sleater Kinney — and dreamed about wandering for hours through Vancouver’s Stanley Park.
With blissful ignorance of the perils of travelling with a baby, I booked our trip. We were to fly to Seattle then drive to Portland, drive back to Seattle, and finally ferry to Vancouver.
Left: Erin and her happy family.
Deep breath!
I booked hotel suites instead of rooms in order to maintain a distinct separation between our daughter and ourselves — otherwise it would be lights out at 7 p.m. and my husband and I would be huddled in the bathroom gazing at an iPad. There’s only so many times one can watch pugs on YouTube before going crazy.
When we made it to Portland — carting three suitcases, one stroller, one baby carrier, far too many cans of Arbonne Baby Care to “carry-on,” and three pairs of baby Toms — my guilty feelings of stripping my child of home were relieved when we reached our hotel, the Monaco. Greeted by an avuncular concierge, we were escorted to their daily Happy Hour, where children line up for ice cream and free rubber duckies while parents queue up for local IPA and wine.
Above: Seattle is one of the family-friendly cities in the world.
Our room was huge — outfitted with a veritable stuffed menagerie for the little one, a beautiful crib and a mini bar big enough to house her bottles and a milk carton. Phew!
The Monaco is well located, a five minute walk to the riverside — a sprawling waterfront that houses weekly artisan markets, as well as the city’s annual Blues Festival — and a five minute walk to the Pearl District, where we spent a chunk of our time.
Formerly a neglected corridor of abandoned warehouses and railways, the Pearl District has been miraculously gentrified into a restored hub of incredible restaurants (shout out to Pearl Bakery, Tasty ‘n’ Alder and Ruby Jewel Scoops), shops, yoga studios, coffee houses (Stumptown at the Ace Hotel a personal favourite), random public pianos, and, of course, Whole Foods. It is a small area, easily covered in a couple of hours, but bounteous enough for couples with babies to while away a week’s time when they fear being too far away from the hotel.
This is not to say that we didn’t venture. We headed to Washington Park, taking the free, family-friendly shuttle uphill, past a spectacular neighbourhood rife with large colonial homes and lush greenery. The expansive and verdant park features the Oregon Zoo, a forestry museum, an arboretum, a children’s museum and a stunning rose garden. I glimpsed yearningly at the roses as we made our way to the zoo with plans to return but you learn very quickly that things get nixed from your list in a flash when you travel with a baby.
We made it to the zoo and walked through the tree-lined area — it seemed quite natural and as close to walking through a forest as it could. For the sake of my daughter, I stomached the idea of heading to a place that in my mind housed lethargic animals, stripped of the wild. But this was not the case with the Oregon Zoo. The staff at the zoo was informed, intelligent and loving and many of the animals living there had been rescued from injury, nursed to health and put on track to be freed.
I thought about this idea of freedom as we made our way back to the hotel for nap time, again and again, the multi-ethnic spices wafting from the food carts and teasing us as we walked by. (No tables, no high chair, no good.)
We’ll go back, we’d say, enthusiastically but we didn’t go back and suddenly we were in Seattle.
When we arrived in the city, we were so happily overwhelmed by its offerings that we made a pact to drag our daughter everywhere at the expense of her schedule (again, deep breath). The spacious, well-appointed Hotel Andra — home to star Chef Tom Douglas’ famed restaurant, Lola — was where we planted ourselves.
For a week we lived right on the edge of Seattle’s trendy Belltown, minutes from the Pacific-facing Pike Place Market (a playground of sights, smells and sounds for little ones), a stroll to the storied streets of Pioneer Square — home to some of the most beautifully restored Renaissance Revival architecture I’d ever laid eyes on — and a quick jaunt upward to my personal favourite, the scenic Capitol Hill district.
Above: Touring the city's famed Public Market can result in a lot of great finds.
Seattle is a charming metropolis, a booming city filled with successful dot-commers and techies alike, yet it has managed to maintain much of its sea-town origins, which is a wonderful thing for a family with a young baby. We explored the beachy, free-feeling Fremont, buttressed against Lake Washington, and watched the fit kayakers and nouveau sailors pass by as our baby crawled around the banks, clapping and waving in pure discovery.
We made it to Ballard, famous for its Hiram M. Chittenden Locks and fish ladder, where visitors descend below sea level to watch thousands of salmon pass through a manmade chute between fresh and salt water, and were tickled by our daughter’s fascination with this true cross-section of the sea.
You could easily get by exploring only the outdoors in the city, but the incredible Seattle Center, with its massive dancing International Fountain, surrounded by children revelling in the water and piped-in tunes, and home to the Frank Gehry-designed Experience Music Project, is not to be missed. The EMP pays spine-tingling tribute to the Seattle music scene, currently with a Nirvana retrospective, containing the band’s first demo tape — tracks listed haphazardly in Kurt Cobain’s child-like scrawl. Children and adults can play DJ and rock star in the museum’s fully interactive Sound Lab and even babies are kept entertained by the glowing screens and music that fill the space.
We meant to make it to Seattle’s aquarium (next time!) but, before we knew it, the foghorn of the Clipper was blaring and we were sailing across the ocean, Vancouver-bound.
Above: Taking the ferry from Seattle to Vancouver is a great experience.
We were headquartered at the trendy and friendly Opus hotel, a few steps from the city’s integral seawall and smack dab in the centre of Yaletown — a hip, patio-filled hub where young success-stories like a pint of lager before heading to their lofts.
Our brightly painted, art-filled room was equipped with a whole bar area, boasting a wine fridge (we used it for milk)in addition to the mini bar and an extra sink — no more bottle washing in the bathroom.
We were glad to feel the warm hug of Vancouver. Although the “glass city,” with its abundance of skyscrapers and seemingly eerie lack of “real homes,” does not have the old-town character of Seattle, there is something to be said for its truly incredible offering — nature.
Above: While Seattle was great, Vancouver offers its own family-friendly attractions.
With the exception of heading to Red Fish Kids, a unique children’s store featuring east-meets-west-inspired fashions for babies and children, we really had no intention of being anywhere but outside. And the nice thing about Vancouver is that the city puts no pressure on you to feel otherwise — as long as you get to the beach you’ve done enough. And that’s what we did.
We walked along the seemingly endless seawall for hours, past First and Second Beach and happened upon the idyllic Third Beach, Vancouver’s least populated and most difficult to reach oasis. We traversed Stanley Park, passed the totem poles, the lush floral pavilion and got lost in the rainforest.
It felt nice to be lost again, to feel fleetingly free of that tick tock. But, then the baby started to cry. “We’ll be back,” we said. It was time to go.