Of the Oft Forgotten Holiday

In our household, we don't really celebrate Mother's Day or Father's Day. Because we emigrated from a country that has similar-ish holidays on completely different days ('Father's Day' would be end of February and 'Mother's Day' would be March 8th), we somehow just stopped celebrating any of these days. That blows of course, because I am a huge fan of celebrating and presents and all that jazz, but with just the 3 of us, it's not as fun anyways.

But this Sunday, Vancouver has continued to bust out its beautiful SUNny streak, so I knew we had to do something special. It just so happened that we were hungry when this idea came around (haha, when am I not hungry?), so brunch it was.

That might not have been the smartest idea, what with us not booking anything in advance and going at 12:30, which is prime brunching territory, but you gotta give us credit for trying.

My absolute favorite place in Montreal to have brunch is Chez Cora. So you can understand my enthusiasm when I found out they opened a branch basically in my own backyard! SO much excitement. Because brunch is hands down the BEST meal of the day.

And yes, those are my own captions. No, they don't put 'drool' on their logo. But they should. Just look at the pretty menu.

I'll be the first to say that I'm a visual person. A lot of the time at restaurants, I just want to sneak a peak at what the dish will look like before I order it, but people tend to take it the wrong way if I start looking over their shoulders while they're eating. So obviously this menu is my idea of heaven.

The giganto pile of fruit with the panini-crepe

This crepe was about 2-forks long. Because hey, if the English can measure in feet (based on some long-dead British monarch), I can measure in forks!

Now everytime I go to Cora's, I swear I'm going to get the pancakes, but when it's actually time to order, somehow I always end up getting something else. This time ... same thing. I split a panini-crepe (imagine ham+egg+cheesy goodness ... but rolled in a crepe and toasted. O.M.G.) and the 'April 89' fruit+custard-stuffed crepe. The food was delish ... the only downside was that because it was Mother's Day, the place was packed and so we had to wait forever for our food. Which meant that by the time it arrived, I wished that I had ALSO ordered the pancakes because I was starving. STARVING. I am not a pretty starving person either. I get these tension headaches and I can't think (haha, except when is that not the case?) and all I can do is stare moodily at the other people who are eating. Thankfully, they had those little game-mats that they give to kids, so I could distract myself for a while at the 'Spot the 5 Differences' game. Then I spent the rest of the time trying to convince my dad that one of the differences was between the grey circles in one picture and the blue circles in another, but apparently my dad is colourblind.

My momma busted out a smile once the food came, but the wait was a tense tense moment. We were basically waiting for Jack Bauer to come diffuse the tension-bomb. Because we were 3 hungry bears.

So the wait sucked. But that meant that despite devouring the equivalent to a whole-days worth of calories, I was at the perfect amount of fullness - aka ready to have a latte and a cookie on our way to the beach! (Side note - I am ALWAYS ready for coffee.)

Since we didn't have any plans for the day, we went to Whytecliff, which is this awesome little picnic/beach area that is usually not as full as all of the popular Vancouver beaches. Unfortunately, it's so awesome that people keep telling their friends and they keep coming so it's usually quite hard/impossible to find parking. My dad recounted his harrowing tale of parking between two trees and 3 cars. Thankfully my mom and I are brats and we told him to just drop us off at the prime picnic/lawn spot before he drove off on his parking adventure, so we didn't have to experience those funtimes.


Can I just say how beautiful it is there?

GORGEOUS.

 Haha. Oh, you wanted to see the scenery? Well I guess that was gorgeous too ...