Downtown Vancouver Favourites: H.R. MacMillan Space Centre

I lived in Vancouver for nine years before moving to the East Coast. My husband was born and raised in Montreal but lived in Vancouver with me for almost four years during the early part of our marriage. I consider Vancouver as my home city in Canada and for my husband, it is his second home. Now, we have a new home in Ottawa.

Our son was born in Ottawa and frequently visits Montreal with us. However, Vancouver, for him, is something unfamiliar and far away.

When we took him there when he was a still a toddler, we made sure that we brought him to some of our favourite places. On some trips, it was just the three of us, and on some, with my family in Vancouver.

I am sure that our son will not remember everything, but there will be plenty of opportunities to go back and rediscover the city I that I have come to love (and greatly miss).

We visited the mountain resort in Whistler and falls in Squamish, hiked and crossed hanging bridges in Capilano and Lynn Valley in Vancouver’s North Shore, went on rides and walked along the lake in Chilliwack, and wandered around a park in Abbotsford.

In downtown Vancouver, we brought him to kid-friendly attractions, along with his second cousins, and we, the adults, got the chance to once again enjoy these places we had overlooked for years. We realized you can never be too old for these things.

H.R. MacMillan Space Centre

The toddler years are the magical wonder years…and what could be more magical and more wonderful than deep space?

We brought the kids (our son and his two second cousins) to Vancouver’s H.R. MacMillan Space Centre (named after the philanthropist who funded it) to indulge their out-of-this world imagination through a 360-degree immersive planetarium show, interactive exhibits, and live science demonstrations that answered the questions generated by their inquisitive minds.

The centre’s Star Theatre offered different films targeted at different age groups. As we had toddlers with us, we chose the hilarious tale of an insomniac hen named Kentucky who lives on the moon. The title, “Total Eclipse Chasers of the Lost Sleep” says it all. This funny hen embarks on a space-time journey to find the perfect solar eclipse that will finally help her get some sleep! It was an educational and entertaining show. Even us, adults, loved it!

At the Ground Station Canada Theatre, they learned how to hunt for planets using a telescope, construct a basic rocket, and understand what daily life means for astronauts floating in space.

There is an interactive exhibit gallery in the facility where lived their Star Trek and Star Wars fantasies by taking turns being captains of a starship in search of a habitable planet and becoming explorers in Mars, trying to find signs of life.

We were there in the early afternoon, and we left right around sunset time to drive south to Delta for a family dinner at my aunt and uncle’s house. That meant foregoing stargazing from the Gordon Macmillan Southam Observatory located close to the space centre. The observatory houses a half-meter Cassegrain telescope, which would have been great to explore the night sky and spot planets and constellations. We thought we’d leave it for another time when the kids are older and can stay up later in the night.