Big White comes to an end, an eventful six weeks spent skiing and for some of us coming to terms with snowboarding techniques. Jan has now progressed to being able to stand up and come down the mountain (nursery slopes) under reasonable control even putting the odd turn in on the way, mind you she does have a sore coccyx and wrist after one or two heavy falls during these stages, but fortunately no broken bones always a plus point.
The ski slopes of Canada have lived up to all our expectations, light powdery snow coupled with empty chair lifts have made for some very enjoyable skiing, especially the last four weeks, where unbroken sunshine has been the order of the day. The eight weeks we have spent skiing here means that we have skied more in Canada than in Europe, something we never thought we might be able to do a few years ago.
We leave Big White on the 13th March catching up with family on our way back to Vancouver. Pat & Bev who I have not seen since 1973, are our first visit down in Kelowna, and then my cousin Nigel has a son who lives in the Okanagan valley at Summerland which is our next stop, getting to know members of our family who we have never met has been one of the nice experiences during our round the world trip. After a very enjoyable drive on highway 3 back to Vancouver, where I hasten to add it didn’t rain at all during the whole drive, a first for us during our stay in Canada. We spend the night in Vancouver before catching the ferry the next morning over to Vancouver Island and the capital city of B.C, Victoria.
This is a very English city which we were quite taken with, spring has definitely arrived here with the tree blossom and daffodils in full bloom. We stay overnight taking in all the usual tourist haunts,
Parliament building,
Thunderbird Park
Craigdarroch Castle,
complete with a couple of local pubs with their own brew dark ales (one even had coffee in it which was particularly nice) and a visit to China town to reacquaint ourselves with Asian food. Our whistle stop tour cumulates with a drive to Courtney nearer the north end of the island where we stop with my cousin Nigel & his wife Heather,
We were going to be picking up Charlotte & Jamie from Mt Washington which is only twenty minutes up the road, but they finished work a week early and took the bus to Kelowna, so we just had to collect their bags from Nigel’s, as we will meet up with them in Vancouver on Friday. Our last week in Vancouver is spent with Charlotte & Jamie,
we have a great couple of days down on Lummi Island in the states with my relatives before
returning to Vancouver so they can fly home on the 25th March, after 18 months of working the ski hills and great outdoors of Canada, it’s been a great experience for them, but all good things must come to an end and so the UK will yet again become their home, for a little while anyway? We cram the sights of Vancouver in over a couple of days, now that the crowds from the Olympics have gone there’s a lot more room in the city for the rest of us, the sun actually shines on Friday and Saturday and we take the skytrain into the city to take in Canada Place, Gastown, & it's steam driven clock.
The view from Vancouver lookout
The Capilano suspension bridge
last visited by me in 1971, it’s now got a treetop walk added attraction with sky high admission prices to go with it. We have now been in Canada some three months and our first impressions of Canada are mixed, the weather has been our first surprise, the amount of rainfall that Vancouver receives during the winter period surpasses anywhere else so far on our travels, we thought England was grey and wet but that’s nothing compared to here, the summers might be nice, but it’s a long long wet winter so we are taking Vancouver off our somewhere else to live list. Mobile phones are a lot more expensive to operate over here, paying to receive calls as well as to make them, and then the banking system must be making a small fortune, as they charge their customers for personal accounts, and yet again chip & pin has not yet taken off so the credit card fraud problem must be astronomical, we have used our card several times where they don’t even take a signature or a pin number all you need is a card (anybody’s card) and away you go. We leave tomorrow for Whistler and the 6000km+ drive across Canada to Halifax on the eastern coast, we are both looking forward to adjusting to life back on the road, but this time we will be sleeping in the back of our car where we can, so let’s hope the sun comes out and it warms up soon so that we can enjoy all of our journey across Canada and not just the parts where the car heater is on.
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