Vancouver Lake Park

We traveled south to Vancouver, Washington for a Biesanz family reunion this weekend. Vancouver is about 2 hours from where we live. Se we made a vacation out of it. I'll write about that later.

My husband found Vancouver Lake Park while looking at the City of Vancouver Website.It was the only covered picnic area left available to rent while we were planning the reunion. We booked it sight unseen for 50 bucks for the afternoon. What a deal! That is half of what we paid to rent a park in Kent. We booked the South part of the Heron shelter.

We showed up to the park not knowing what to expect. We were pleasantly surprised to find these awesome things.

• a large covered picnic area with a sink, counter space, a grill, electrical outlets and plenty of space for our reunion
• plenty of close parking and easy access for everyone in the family
• we were super close to the fun playground with swings, a balance beam/teeter totter combo, and plenty of spaces to climb, slide and explore
• the bathrooms were right next door to the playground and they were clean and had a baby changing area. 
• there was a large grassy field surrounding our shelter which we used for running, kicking balls around, and general merriment
• we could walk down to the water but were warned upon entering the park that the lake wasn't safe for swimming while we were there

There was a park greeter at the entrance that warned us about what my nephew called "swamp crotch" and directed us to our picnic area. The park is big and directions were necessary and I didn't want anything happening to our crotches so was thankful for the friendly greeter.
  
The only thing we didn't understand when we rented the shelter was that by renting half of the shelter we were really renting half of the shelter. There was a 40 year high school reunion going on in the north part of the shelter. If we had known there would be no clear line separating the 2 picnics, we would have brought something (like streamers) to define the 2 spaces. We didn't mind sharing the space, however, we did have a few high school reunioner's wandering over to our table and grabbing some food. Not a big deal, we had plenty and it was an honest mistake. There was nothing saying "this is ours and that is yours" and the spaces were basically mirror images of each other.

This park was cool. Definitely a place where we could spend more time. It was fun to visit a park out of our area. the best part was seeing the Biesanz side of the family.