It’s Us, Isn’t It?. Monday 5th November - Lantzville to Whistler

We had to get up in the dark to get to the ferry this morning which was a bit uncivilised, but Sunny and Al had planned a monster day for us in the even more monster truck they’d hired for that very purpose, and the least we could do was to accompany them.  

The first planned stop was the Museum of Anthropology in Vancouver which is well served by a multi story carpark.  Thankfully parking was not expensive by our own inner city standards, but none the less it might have been nice of the museum people to place their “closed Monday” sign at the entrance to the carpark rather than at the pedestrian exit.  While this was a little disconcerting to our hosts, to put it mildly we are not inexperienced in things closing as we approach, and in our vast experience, disappointment is always followed by some unexpected highlight.

In this case the Vancouver waterfront and Granville Island kept us just as enthralled as poking round stuffy old canoes and carvings would have anyway, and we had to drag ourselves away in the end for the road trip to our next disappointment. 

It's All Because of Daylight Saving. Sunday 4th November - Lantzville

We woke this morning to our eighth time zone change in three weeks and wonder if it’s not finally catching up with us.  

One of our number was a bit curtailed with an inflamed achilles tendon, two were battling minor illness with the sort of stoicism that causes grown men to exchange silent nods of mutual sympathy, while the sole survivor of this week of rollicking good times not wishing to be left out perhaps, twisted her ankle somewhere in the wilds during our usual morning excursion.

With nothing compelling on our agenda except for a bit of provisioning and packing for our road trip tomorrow, thoughts of exploration further abroad were quickly extinguished in favour of spending a leisurely Sunday afternoon appropriately recumbent, licking our wounds in front of a nice warm fire.

Oh we do like to be beside the seaside. Saturday 3rd November - Lantzville

We don’t normally think of bunging on the Wellies for a walk along the beach, but we don’t normally walk on the beach if the temperature is in single digits either. 

While normally the abundance of interesting flotsam and sea shells on the shore would be a reflection of an abundance of life in the adjacent waters.  In this instance we do have to wonder if it’s just an indicator that no one else is stupid enough to be out fossicking among in the rain in sub ten degree temperatures.   Normally in our experience it’s great to feel sand between the toes too, but here that would be a sign that one’s toenails are probably about to turn blue and it’s time for a new pair of boots. 

On the face of it Rook enjoyed himself even more than we did, running around like the puppy he was long ago but we did look askance at those poor little bare feet and wonder if he wasn’t just trying to get some feeling back into his toes.

Places to go, People to see. Friday 2nd November - Lantzville

Perhaps we gave the wrong impression yesterday about just how easy life is in Sunny and Al’s care.   Be assured there are jobs that need doing and it’s a little hard to describe just how difficult it was to get a proper afternoon snooze with Al outside cleaning up the yard with the leaf blower.

Despite that particular adversity, we did manage to appear quite bright eyed when it was time for Rook and we to once again climb aboard the monster truck to watch them attend to even more chores in the afternoon.  This seemed to mostly involve driving down shady leaf strewn lanes to pick up organic eggs, or perhaps embarrassingly to dispose of our carefully carved pumpkins, now destined to make some equally carefully raised yet hungry animals even happier than perhaps they already were.  

If this is mundane, we do have some concerns about how we will cope when we get to the actual pretty bits.

A Dog’s Life. Thursday 1st November - Lantzville

Probably the biggest compliment we can pay our hosts is to say they treat us even better than they treat their dog.

We’re settling into a bit of a pattern now, Rook and we.  After we have been fed in the morning, we are taken for glorious frolics through the mist in the forest, then when we get back we are allowed, or perhaps even encouraged to have a snooze before (and after) being fed again.

Sometimes, if we’ve been good, the three of us allowed to go for a ride in the car to the shops.  This is not necessarily a highlight of the day for one of us, but the other seems to bear up under the strain. It will be interesting to see a week from now, what use can be put to all of those merino mid layers on the other side of the world when the temperature is four times what it is outdoors at present. 

Pumpkins. Wednesday 31st October - Lantzville

One of us has never particularly liked pumpkin.  It once was even higher on his list of undesirable foods than Brussels sprouts, stringy beans and bitter, stringy rhubarb.  Quite possibly “despise” could be the most accurate term for his relationship with the ghastly vegetable although he would prefer not to think of it as a relationship at all.

Therefore, when the opportunity arose to give a pumpkin a craniotomy and stab its eyes out, it seemed like a chance to avenge a lifetime of mealtime trauma, and he did so with some relish.  There we were, in a familiar kitchen in a foreign land partaking in a custom that we barely understood, not even pretending that we weren’t enjoying ourselves.

While the events of this evening did little to enlighten our ignorant Antipodean selves of the significance of Halloween in this part of the world, there can be absolutely no doubt that the presence of sugar, pumpkins, bonfires, fireworks, children dressed as hotdogs and adults dressed as mustard bottles are all anyone needs to have a rollicking good time, and when a rollicking good time is had, who needs significance anyway? 

Oh Canada!. Tuesday 30th October - Vancouver to Lantzville

The float plane landed and taxied to the dock if that’s what float planes do, and Sunny and Al were right where we left them five years ago, behind the security gate looking as though they were expecting us, perhaps already wondering what we’d leave behind this time.

We must have been mid-sentence when we last departed, because we all began at once beginning from where we had left off, with a good deal of urgency, all of us apparently oblivious to the the fact that all being well we had the rest of the week and a good deal of the next to catch up.  We simply stood talking and laughing on the dock unaware of our surroundings, quite possibly risking death by exposure or starvation, until one of us or perhaps all of us at once, came to our senses and we moved in search of warmth and sustenance indoors.

Having recently discovered that social interaction is a key factor in arresting cognitive decline as we age, those first few hours of our reunion alone were enough to convince us that we need not worry about the autumn of our brain function appearing for the next week at least.