Over the last few years, it's become a sort of family tradition for us to visit Maplewood Farm in North Vancouver once spring rolls around. Our first visit in 2013 was on Easter Sunday, and involved an Easter egg hunt, some chocolate eggs handed out by the Easter bunny, and lots and lots of goats and bunnies.
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| Up close and personal with a friendly goat. |
Maplewood Farm is a fantastic place to visit with kids, especially on a nice and sunny day. My kids especially love the goat enclosure, where they get to interact with and pet the miniature goats. These animals are so gentle and friendly that they really seem more like dogs than farm-animals! The giant white rabbits are another highlight of every visit: this year there were a couple of guinea pigs in with the bunnies as well, though they mostly tried to hide from visitors.
We ate our picnic lunch at one of the wooden tables at the farm, enjoying the warm spring sunshine, collected some colourful Easter eggs that the kids then traded for a goodie-bag each in the farm's greenhouse, and then checked out the other animals around the farm: free-roaming chickens, tiny yellow chicks in the hen-house, the woolly sheep, the birds in their cages, and the big horses being groomed in the outside paddock.
The farm is easy to get to from Vancouver, and there's a lot of free parking adjacent to it. If your kids want to hang out and play before and after the farm-visit, there's a nice little playground right next door too.
For more information about rates and special events, visit
Maplewood Farm's website.
