The White House burns

Did you know that Canada is the only country to ever invade the US? And they burnt down the White House and numerous other public buildings! It happened in 1812 as a result of the US attempting to take over Canada. True!

Leigh and Jay's island home

Leigh and Jay live in Campbell River, a town of around 35,000, half way up the coast, a few minutes from the beach and 40 minutes from skiing at Mt Washington and plenty of local mountain bike trails. It is a nice sized relaxed town with all the shops and facilities. A nice place to live.

The beach at Campbell River. Canadian drift wood is way bigger than Australian drift wood and very straight! And you are allowed to cut it up for fire wood.

 The beach is rather rocky and grey and gravelly - but look at the snow capped mountains across the ocean! That's something we don't see in Australia.

Vancouver Island

Vancouver Island lies off the southern west coast of Canada. It has a milder climate than much of the mainland, but also receives metres of snow in winter. It is 460 km long and has an average width of 100 km. It is less than half the size of Tasmania but has a population of approximately 800,000. Tasmania has just over 500,000. Most of these 800,000 people live along a narrow section of the eastern coast which makes that area quite busy in places. There are many small islands, mountains, forests, and rugged remote coastal areas. Forestry, fishing and tourism are the main industries. A one and half hour ferry ride gets you there from Vancouver and the ferries travel all day every day on the hour via two routes. Lots of people live on small islands between Vancouver Island and the mainland so there are also ferries and water taxis travelling all around them too.

Yes, Baden - brings a tear to the eye. Reminds one of the Spirit of Tasmania.

Transformations on the shoreline

Campbell River hosts an annual wood carving competition on the shoreline. Numerous huge logs are carved over a week long period, judged and later auctioned off to be displayed in local gardens and businesses. Here are some of this year's creations:

Orcas (my best whale watching photo)

 Very hungry caterpillas

 Mother's Day - very intricate carving on the bears for their fur.

 Leigh and Joel admiring this dragon with a marble (a bowling ball)

 Raven - an important indigenous symbol

Humming bird on roses. Leigh and Jay have a humming bird feeder hanging from the eaves at the back of their house which is visited every day by tiny humming birds whose fast moving wings sound like a buzzing insect.

Walking at Forbidden Plateau

A bit higher up in the mountains from our riding location is the beautiful top of Forbidden Plateau which includes the Mt Washington ski resort. For some undisclosed reason they decided not to open the mountain bike trails this year. Shame - we could have totalled 9 chairlift accessed bike parks.

Instead we went for a lovely walk to Paradise Meadows with Leigh and Mackenzie (who is named after one of the many lakes there).

 

 

Riding at Forbidden Plateau

Jay and Leigh organised a awesome crew to shuttle their local trails at Forbidden Plateau. Quite long and lots of fun. Here we are the top. Yes - all those bikes just came off the back of that ute, along with a dog and six people.

 

 Leigh and me! Nanna and Grandma ride together again! I have missed riding with Leigh since she went back to Canada.

 Jay cooling his feet with MacKenzie on his back after riding. We had a picnic by this beautiful river for our lunch.

Sorry

Sorry - there have been no blogs posts for several days. Blame the Vancouver Islanders for keeping me too busy! 

We had a wonderful 4 days with Leigh and Jay (who we met in Hobart a few years ago when they were working there and I bought Leigh's old downhill bike as my first downhill bike) We parked the motorhome on their front driveway and they looked after us very very well. They are wonderful friends and amazing parents to an extraordinarily cute and happy little baby girl who is all smiles.

Get ready for a series of posts about Vancouver Island.

Now that Joel and I are now back in Whistler, where we began our epic wanders and where we will be riding for a week before attempting the return to normality, whatever that is - I will do some catch up blogging.