Happy Father's Day!

Happy Father's Day! Rather than getting gifts I prefer to go on a field trip for Father's day. (Though I did get socks, cards, a paper weight from Carter and a friendship bracelet from Callie that she planned for and made all on her own.) This year we headed to the Space Center. Callie is fascinated by the stars and constellations and has been looking forward to this day for weeks.
From the outside the Space Center would appear to be a world class facility. I went a few years ago with Kerry's grade six class and it seemed like a great place to take your kids. There was a flight simulator similar to Star Tours at Disneyland, the planetarium and the place was packed.

A lot has changed in six years however. It's June and you would expect this to be peak season for tourists however the place was virtually deserted and there have been several unfortunate changes. They were only showing one movie, the gift shop closed two years ago, we saw no evidence that the flight simulator was working, they've switched portions of the facility into the Vancouver Museum and another portion was being rented out to a church. (I'm curious about a church that sets up shop in a facility that looks like a flying saucer.) Vancouver has had some trouble keeping facilities like this open recently with the closing of the petting zoo at Stanley park. We just don't seem to draw in enough people and Vancouver is spending all it's money on bike lanes. I do hope they're able to keep this facility open but to draw more people they're going to have to make some changes.

Despite the changes Callie and Carter still had a great time. We got to see a presentation on rockets and since there were only 8 of us in the room Carter got to go on stage and help. We also went to see a planetarium presentation in honour of Galileo's 400th birthday. (Or maybe the 400th anniversary of the telecscope.) This was what Callie was looking forward to the most because it showed stars. They use the strange contraption to the right to project the stars and another to show the movie. She really enjoyed the show and we might have to back to see the upcoming show called "The Constellation Makers".