Where the whale-fishes blow

6th May; Day 7

This hotel, the Tin Wis (the name means 'Calm Waters', apparently) is different again from the others where we've stayed. It's mainly a two-storey building; our room is on the ground floor, with sliding doors onto a patio, from where you walk across an area of lawn to a beautiful Pacific beach.






Today was disappointingly wet, but that didn't deter us from doing one of the activities we'd been looking forward to; whale-watching.

Brrr!


There were only seven of us as paying customers on board a small vessel, and it was a good thing that Ned and I are both pretty good sailors because there was quite a lot of swell, and we would otherwise have been as miserable as the poor Japanese couple who spent the whole of the 3½ hour trip below decks enduring all the phases of seasickness known to man, and couldn't raise their heads to see anything. Ned did wonder whether they were overcome at the sight of all that food not being harpooned, but gave them the benefit of the doubt.

We up above in the fresh air were treated to a display of a group of three humpback whales blowing and banging their tail flukes on the surface, and another in the distance (too far for a photo) breaching.





It was such a thrill - the rule is that boats aren't allowed to go within a certain distance of the whales, but of course nobody's told the whales. Towards the end there were two, swimming side by side directly towards us, then they dived about 100 yards away. I was waiting for their tails to appear for an amazing picture but sadly they didn't. By crikey, it was cold! With all the excitement of actually seeing these beasts we didn't really notice the wet and the chill, but when we were returning to Tofino it really hit us, and I couldn't even put on my gloves because my hands had gone quite numb. On the way back we did a trip to see the sealions



but by then all I really wanted was a hot bath and to be able to feel my blood circulating again. Despite that we wouldn't have missed it for the world.

(And when we got back to the hotel there was an email telling me that Daisy-pup had passed her hearing test, so was ours!)

Over the hills and far away

5th May: day 6

Today we left Victoria on the longest leg of the driving - about 200 miles to Tofino on on the Pacific coast. And it was the first journey where we failed to get lost! The scenery was amazing; towering pines, mountains, rushing rivers.



We stopped for a break about halfway along the route at Cathedral Grove, an area of original forest with Douglas firs and hemlocks, some of which are 800 years old.





They were fantastic; and many of the trees were covered in moss, looking as though they were furry. Fir trees looking like fur trees!



The second half of the drive seemed endless. And it was odd because we'd started at sea level in Victoria and didn't seem to climb particularly high, but on this leg we seemed to be travelling downhill all the way, even after passing a lake which, according to the map, was tidal.



Still we descended. This poor little car (a Kia Soul) will struggle on the way back because then of course it'll be uphill all the way! At least it's not a busy road.

We were surprised to drive through an area where there was still snow on the ground.


We'd heard it's been an appalling spring out here but didn't realise it was this bad.

Viva Victoria

4th May: Day 5

The fire fairies have struck again; a building under construction in Richmond which we drove past when we were lost burnt down during the night ...

Our full day in Victoria was partly spent in the company of an internet contact who I met through a mutual interest in the early history of British Columbia; my great-great-grandfather was responsible for mapping the border between the US and Canada along the 49th Parallel - using astronomical instruments to decide exactly where the twenty-foot wide strip of forest should be felled to mark to boundary - all the way from the coast into the Rockies, in a dead straight line to the border with Alberta. This was one of the reasons why I wanted to visit the area. Anyway, this chap Simon is extremely knowledgeable about the period and very kindly drove us around to see various places my ancestor would have known. This small marker is the remaining one of three which were the starting point for the triangulation.



He was also very handy for giving us the correct pronunciation of the place-names in the area, which I only knew from my ancestor's letters. I'd always assumed that Esquimault was pronounced Eskimo, but instead it's Esk-why-malt. (In the 1860s this was a particularly insalubrious area, mainly populated by "Indian prostitutes and fornicating sailors". Luckily it's improved since then!) He also runs a very popular (judging by the length of the queue) fish bar on the harbour, called Red Fish Blue Fish and he treated us to excellent fish and chips.

As well as all this we splashed out (possibly the wrong turn of phrase!) on a floatplane sightseeing flight over the area, (somewhat smaller than the last plane we went on!)






as well as finishing yesterday's multicache by visiting Spinnakers brewpub then enjoying a very pleasant walk back into town for dinner, watching the funny little bumble-bee ferries buzzing from side to side of the harbour.

Hit the road, Jack

May 3rd: Day 4

The weather's got its act together and is fine again. This has come as a great relief because today we picked up the hire car from downtown and gingerly drove back to the hotel to collect our luggage. We had a straightforward drive to the ferry port at Tsawwassen, if you discount getting lost in Richmond. The road signs aren't all as clear or as obvious as they could be to strangers. The road use, once you've come to terms with being on the wrong side of the road, is slightly different too. When the traffic lights are red and you want to turn right (so not crossing the carriageway) you can ignore the red light. However pedestrians will have been given the signal to cross, and you must give way to them. Luckily the speed limits are low so you don't feel hassled - and the other drivers are remarkably courteous - horns are hardly ever used.

Another slight hiccup was that the ferry company had never seen a travel voucher like ours, but after a phonecall to colleagues all was well (managed very efficiently and in a friendly manner). Phew! We're starting to feel like guineapigs for this tour company. They really haven't got their act together.

We reached the hotel in Victoria relatively painlessly; our room is on the 16th (or 15th when you take into account the missing 13th) floor and has a fine view over the southern part of the city.



The coffee-making facilities have improved and include a cooker, microwave and fridge!


We decided to make the most of the fine day and braved the chilly breeze to have a look around.

The Parliament building



Another hotel



We made a start on a multicache (geocaching is an excellent way of touring an area you don't know) but involved visiting brewpubs for clues (Swans and Canoe), and it would have been rude not to sample their wares (and get treated to free tasters of various unusual gins); we decided to complete the cache tomorrow!

We had dinner at The Wharfside which is supposed to do the best seafood in town. It was good, but not great.



What we find really annoying is the way purchase tax isn't included in the display price of goods. You budget for the advertised price and find the final bill comes as quite a shock. Thank goodness we don't do it that way.

The trees they do grow high

May 2nd: Day 3

Fire seems to be following us around; we were woken at about 6am by sirens which we later learned (watching the news in bed - how decadent!) was an old house about 4 blocks away burning down; I don't think anyone was inside. The weather today was on the side of the firefighters - a steady light rain.

We spent the day walking round Stanley Park geocaching. When we'd seen Stanley Park on the map we imagined something similar to Hyde Park but with more trees. In fact it is surprisingly hilly and the forest astonishing. Some of the trees are massive; here I give a sense of scale.



It's a shame that the tallest have been topped at something over 100'; goodness knows how tall they want to be. Old trees have been felled leaving stumps about 8' high; leaf litter forms on the tops of the stumps and new trees seed themselves into this and eventually their roots eat away the remains of the stump leaving a new tree growing independently but with its roots starting way up above the ground.



To take a bit of shelter from the rain we visited Vancouver Aquarium where they have everything from jellyfish



and treefrogs



and an injured porpoise (who seemed to be as curious about us as we were about her)



and rather tragic beluga whales.

We found eight caches, failed to find two, and must have walked about 10 miles - I wonder how stiff our legs will be tomorrow! We also saw two black squirrels and a very pretty bird which behaved very like a blackbird. I later found out it was a North American robin, which is indeed in the blackbird family.



Finally, with the help of Eddy Chau at the hotel reception, we've sorted out the cock-up by either the travel agent or, as I suspect, the tour company, and we now have our vouchers to show we've paid for the hotels and ferries for the remaining part of the holiday, which we'd been told would be waiting for us in Vancouver - and they weren't. I feel a strongly-worded letter of complaint will be written in due course - we could have done without the stress.

Holiday, celebrate

April 30th 2011: Day 1
Pack, unpack, repack, dither, worry. What are we going to need? What needs to go in which bag? Checked in online (a good innovation since we last flew), said goodbye to Boy and Piggy and drove to the hotel near Heathrow to avoid a mad rush down the motorway in the morning. Set the new travel alarm for a suitable hour and went to sleep, to be woken suddenly quite soon after by a loud bleeping. After beating the alarm clock hard and failing to stop the noise we realised the noise was actually the hotel fire alarm. We fell out of bed in a daze, threw on some clothes and emerged onto the landing along with the occupants of neighbouring rooms. At this point the alarm stopped, so we had a brief discussion ("Can you smell smoke? I can't smell smoke.") and all turned round and went back to bed.

May 1st: Day 2
Found a polite letter pushed under our door thanking us for our co-operation during the evacuation of the hotel last night. Oops.

Caught the shuttle bus to the airport. What a confusing place that is. The signage is pretty unhelpful, sending you up 4 floors, then down 3, then up then down again until you've completely lost your bearings. There seems to be so much 'Hurry up and wait'; queuing up for one procedure then walking substantial distances just to join another queue. We had to remove our boots to go through security, then had to sit and wait again, only to be herded like sheep (quietly bleating "baa, baa" as if at Cropredy) through the next section, with the voice over the airport tannoy reminiscent of Logan's Run.

The inflight movie system has improved since I last did a long-haul flight (in 1976!). Back then there were large screens at the front of each section of the aircraft with the sound coming through individual headphones. If you were unlucky (as I was) your seat position sometimes meant that you couldn't comfortably watch the screen in your section and had to watch the one in front - which wasn't quite in sync with your screen, making watching the film more of a trial than a pleasure. Now everyone has individual screens in the back of the seat in front with a wide choice of viewing options. I watched The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (very enjoyable) and The King's Speech (very well acted) as well as an episode of Upstairs Downstairs and listened to a Moody Blues album whilst dozing. (It was a long flight!) The view from the window was amazing; we had clear skies almost all the way - I wondered what on earth I could see below us, then realised it was the shadow of the plane and the vapour trail on the sea


and what we thought was the tops of clouds turned out to be the snow in Greenland.


Vancouver airport is very civilised and well organised, with helpful staff at the information desk who could tell us where to catch the train and bus we needed to reach our hotel. The girl would have been right except for the fact that there had been a marathon through the city that morning and the buses had been re-routed. We learned this from a very considerate political canvasser who took pity on us after we'd been standing at the bus stop for 15 minutes. So we decided to stretch our legs properly after sitting for so long and walked to the hotel; luckily it wasn't too far and all in a straight line so we couldn't get lost, and even in that short distance we passed five Starbucks in case we were in need of an emergency coffee.

After checking into the hotel we took another little stroll along English Bay, enjoying the sunshine

despite it being late at night as far as we were concerned. It's a very pretty area, and we were fascinated by the lengths people go to with their roof gardens:


I wonder how they've ensured its stability during high winds.

Cos you look sweet

Our new baby has joined the family! We collected her from Oop North this morning, and she was only sick once during the long drive home. She was understandably a little bewildered when she arrived, especially when the only vaguely familiar thing (another spotty) viewed her with horror


as if she had recently beamed down from Mars. After a few minutes with her making all the right subordinate moves he started to come around, so I'm sure it won't be many days before he's more comfortable in her presence.


She does look very small in a Big Dog's bed!

Give me your answer, do

The puppy passed her hearing test and we've decided on the name Daisy. This is her at 6 weeks of age.



We collect her on Saturday! I wonder how Piglet's going to react.

I really wanna know

Last time I was looking for a puppy it took ages. I spent about a year getting my name on waiting lists and visiting litters, but although all the puppies were sweet there wasn't one that said "Hello, I'm yours" to us. Then we heard of a litter where there were six dog puppies and one bitch; it was essential that the chosen pup was a bitch, so I didn't hold out great hopes for this one. Still, nothing ventured and all that, so we went to see them. I scanned these seven puppies on the floor, and my eye was caught by one in particular. I bent down to pick it up - and it was the bitch. So we had her - and Clover was a very much loved member of our family.

Well, I'm not really sure how it happened - one casual email has had a rather surprising result. I expected to go through months and months of fruitless enquiries but I seem to have paid a deposit (refundable if the BAER result is unsatisfactory) on a four week old baby:





we walked into the room they were in, and all the puppies were asleep except for one, who was sitting near the door looking up at us; and this was the only available bitch, the one the breeder had suggested we might be interested in. I bent down to stroke her face and she seized my finger and started sucking on it.

All being well she comes to us at the end of May. But she needs a name ...

I know I'm not super hip and I'm liable to take a slip

There I was, happily putting in extra-curricular hours designing advertising material even when the sun was shining and there were a squillion things I could be doing outside, absorbing UV rays and converting them to strong, healthy bones so that I don't crumble to dust in the next puff of wind, when I realised that I was actually concerning myself about whether 'the market' gave a tinker's cuss about the shape of the background.

You see, I realised the Evil that is Political Correctness has insinuated itself into my mind, and I was actually troubled about whether using a 6-pointed star background to advertise pet food might offend Jews or whether a 5-pointed star might might indicate witchery.

I must bleach my this contamination from my brain. It is utterly intolerable, not to say appallingly patronising, to start wondering whether random pretty shapes might prove offensive to anyone. That suggests that they don't have the intelligence to see that a shape is just that, and contains no subtle meaning behind it. If anyone's offended by a shape, get over yourself.

I never thought I'd sink so low.

Thankful for her Fine Fare discount, Tess co-operates

I'm sure we all remember playing The Tesco Game until that particular promotion came to an end. But all is not lost - there's a new, updated version! Hooray!

I think it was originated by Asda, but now Tesco have stepped up to the mark with their version. It does rely on you having access to a computer, but all you have to do is enter the row of numbers at the very bottom of your till receipt, give them your email address, and wait a day or so for the reply. Their system checks the price you paid against Asda's price for the same items, and if Asda were cheaper you get double the difference.

The first two receipts I tried were failures; my shopping bill was 75p and 23p cheaper than they would have been. Third time lucky, however; I was told I'd paid £2.52 more than necessary, so I now have a lovely voucher for £5.04, carefully stapled to the original receipt to make it valid.

I'm very tempted to copy this chap who's taken this new Tesco game to a professional level. Henry would have been in his element, making a profit out of other people's litter.

Although I hoped we weren't very far away from the end

A third weekend's work has seen the second and last of the variable vegetable beds (as opposed to the permanently-planted ones, with currants and raspberries) reconstructed, turf dug and relaid and even a few potatoes planted!




And done without needing to move the leeks and garlic.

The paths still need to be properly laid - there's another weekend's work there - and it'll look fab.

Cut not its earth-bound ties

Last spring our poor bay tree was looking very much the worse for wear, but struggled manfully and pulled through. A second hard winter of substantially sub-zero temperatures delivered the coup de grâce and there's no hope, despite the saying that a tree's only dead when it's been dead for a year. When the main branches have split as badly as this



there's only one thing to do.



It had to come down. It had got some mighty roots (which we were fascinated to discover smell like sandalwood, not bay), but it eventually gave up the struggle. I've planted our pot-bound plum tree in its place; it looks rather puny but with luck it'll feel happier there and might even have proper-sized fruit.

I'm like a bird, I'll only fly away

Last year, despite the apricot tree having several flowers, it only set one fruit (which turned out to be the most delicious apricot in the history of the world); we'd hoped for better things this year - one fruit each, perhaps, instead of having to share. It duly developed several flower buds which swelled promisingly, and in the last few days of mild weather and sunshine they started to open.

They are no more. Today they were all systematically removed by this little so-and-so:





Having stripped the tree he then spent the next seven hours of daylight battering at the window, fluttering from the top of the frame to the window-ledge at the bottom and up again, and getting into most undignified positions.





I wonder what roast bluetit tastes like.