What to Do in Richmond on a Rainy Day

Richmond rain is not dramatic. It rarely arrives as a storm. It settles in, a flat grey lid over the delta that can sit there for a week and a half without ever properly committing to anything, and the ditches fill up, and the dyke turns to soup, and by day six you are looking at your own ceiling with real hostility. That is the version you need a plan for. Not one bad afternoon. Nine days in a row.

People ask me about this more than almost anything else, usually people who moved here from somewhere with a proper winter and assumed the coast would be milder in a way that felt better than this. So here is my honest answer, roughly in the order I actually use it.

The Oval is the default, and it earns it

The Richmond Olympic Oval sits down on the Middle Arm below Lansdowne, and on a bad day it is the most useful building in the city. The roof alone is worth walking in for. It is that long wave of BC wood, a lot of it milled from beetle-killed pine, and standing underneath it on a wet Sunday you get a surprising amount of daylight for a day that does not have any.

The floor gets reconfigured constantly. Depending on the season there is drop-in badminton, basketball, courts you can book, a climbing wall, a very large gym, and ice. Programming moves around more than you would expect, so look at the schedule before you drive over rather than after. The Richmond Olympic Experience, the museum part, is good for about ninety minutes with kids who like pressing things, and the sport simulators are the bit they will talk about afterwards. Adults get maybe twenty minutes out of it and then want lunch.

The weak spot is getting there. The Oval is not on the Canada Line. Lansdowne station is closest and it is a fifteen-minute walk down through the towers, which in heavy rain is considerably longer than fifteen minutes. There is parking on site, and on a wet weekend that is the right call.

The malls are the actual rainy-day infrastructure

This is the thing I would tell anyone new to the city. Richmond has more usable indoor public space per square kilometre than most places its size, and nearly all of it is retail. You can spend a whole wet afternoon in the Golden Village without being outside for more than a minute at a stretch, and the reason to do it is the food, not the shopping.

Start at Aberdeen Centre, largely because it is the one mall here with its own Canada Line station right across the street, and on a rainy day that is worth more than anything else about the building. The parkade backs up badly on weekend afternoons. If it is a Saturday, take the train and skip the whole problem. Upstairs there is a food court that does the thing food courts here do properly, which is a dozen small kitchens each cooking one dish well, and Fisherman's Terrace Seafood Restaurant is on the upper level if you would rather sit down and order dim sum than eat standing up with your coat over your arm.

From there you can cross to Yaohan Centre, which has a supermarket and an older, smaller food court that I like more than I can properly justify, then carry on south to Parker Place. Parker Place is the errand version of a mall rather than the outing version, which is exactly what I want some days, and the Kam Do Bakery counter there is the reason I know the layout by heart. Further down No. 3 Road, Lansdowne Centre has been living under redevelopment plans for years and it shows, but it is warm and quiet and the walk from its station is about ninety seconds. Richmond Centre, at Brighouse, is the mainstream mall, the one you go to when you genuinely need socks. Saint Germain Bakery has a counter at both Aberdeen and Richmond Centre, which is useful to know when the line at one of them is out the door.

If it is cold as well as wet, the answer is hot pot. That is not a clever recommendation, it is just correct. Haidilao Hot Pot in City Centre is where most people end up, and the wait can be long enough that you should put your name down and then go walk a loop of the mall. Liuyishou Hotpot is the other one I rotate through when I cannot face the queue. Afterwards, Snowy Village Dessert Cafe if there are teenagers involved, or a pot of tea and something baked at Pearl Castle Cafe, which is the sort of place where nobody minds you sitting for an hour with a wet jacket hung over the back of your chair.

The trick with a long stretch of rain is not finding one thing to do. It is having four places you can rotate through without having to make a decision.

Minoru, for a quiet day rather than a busy one

The block bounded by Granville, Minoru and No. 3 Road is the closest thing Richmond has to a civic centre, and almost all of it is indoors. The main branch of the Richmond Public Library shares a building with the Richmond Cultural Centre, and it is a properly good library, the kind with a holds shelf you can lose twenty minutes to and a media lab where you can book time on equipment you would never buy. The Richmond Art Gallery is in the same complex and takes about twenty-five minutes, which happens to be exactly the right amount of gallery for a wet Saturday. Minoru Centre for Active Living, on the other side of the plaza, has the pool. Gateway Theatre is a two-minute walk from all of it if you want to check what is on.

If the rain breaks for half an hour, the lakes and the little wooden chapel out front are worth the loop before you get back in the car.

Riverport, if the goal is to exhaust children

Out where Steveston Highway meets No. 5 Road there is a cluster of buildings that solves an entire afternoon from one parking lot: the big cinema, Watermania with the slides, and the ice rinks. It is not charming. It is extremely effective. The pool is busiest late afternoon and on school holidays, the change rooms are chaos on a rainy Sunday, and you should bring your own lock rather than trust the arrangement you find.

Steveston is better in the rain than people admit

Everyone treats the village as a summer place, which means that in February, with the boardwalk empty and the boats working and the whole harbour the colour of dishwater, it is better. You just have to accept that the eating is mostly a takeout-window proposition. Pajo's Fish & Chips at the wharf in the rain means eating in your car, which I have done many times and do not regret. Cannery Cafe is where I go when I want to sit down with a book and a coffee and let the windows steam up, and Britannia Brewing Steveston works for the same reason later in the day.

Britannia Shipyards and the cannery are the two indoor heritage sites down there, and both keep seasonal hours, so check before you drive over in January. The other thing about a wet weekday in the village: parking, which is a fight from May to September, is suddenly not a problem at all.

What I do not do

Garry Point in horizontal rain. There is no shelter at all out on that point and the wind comes straight off the Strait, so you get soaked in two directions and then have to sit in a wet car. No. 3 Road at five o'clock on a wet weekday, because the whole corridor seizes up and you will spend forty minutes covering two kilometres. And the outlet mall out on Sea Island on a rainy Saturday, which everyone in the Lower Mainland has the same idea about at the same time.

One last practical note that took me years to bother with. Keep a towel in the car and a second pair of shoes in a bag by the door, because the difference between enjoying a wet Richmond day and resenting it is almost entirely about feet. November here is when you find out whether you actually like where you live. I do, but I have also come to accept that a good chunk of my winter happens under a roof somebody built for shopping, eating tea eggs at a food court table with Biscuit waiting at home on a towel, and I have stopped feeling odd about that.