It's like Venice...Italy...and California...but not...

We have a new mandate, Emily and I, to seek adventures of a Sunday, rather than, well, not. And so we plugged in Daisy, the trusty if sometimes a little addled GPS, and headed...well...somewhere! In this case, the "somewhere" that I plugged in was New Westminster - Quayside it said. I was thinking I would get to see the lovely public market there, but instead we found, well, we found these:

It's mid-February and little green things are beginning. Ah, yes, *that's* why I'm here. And we found:

We stumbled onto a boardwalk along the Fraser river, and found this weird wannabe Venice, Italy - fountains and reservoirs and even somewhere a classical-type statue (I did not take a picture of the statue because it mostly made me sad). It scared Em, but I rather enjoyed it. But we said goodbye to wannabe Italy and went back to the boardwalk (which wanted to be Venice Beach, CA) and found this:

Train tracks leading to nowhere, or to barges, but we don't think they're working anymore. And then, most wonderful, we found this!:

and Em got to climb. I got to take pictures of Em climbing (because it is a joy to watch). And I found pinecones (the good kind) and brought some home. It was nice to find all this about 20 minutes from home (by car!)