In Canada
There are so many parks, trails and other good places to walk scarcely a stone-throw from our neighbourhood that it will be a considerable time before we have visited them all even once. Bear Hill is pretty close to the centre of the peninsula – about half way between Sidney and central Victoria. The Girl and I ‘yomped’ up it last weekend – Fuji x10 in hand. Here be snaps!
If you expand the panorama by clicking on it you will get a good idea of the vista from the top of the hill.
I experienced an interesting echo of Britain’s colonial past this recent long holiday weekend. The occasion was my first visit to the excellent and hugely popular Victoria Highland Games.
That this was the one hundred and fifty third such informs us not only as to their date of origin but also as to the continuing popularity of the event. As was our colonial forebears’ wont around the globe the original intent of the festival would have been to recreate a much loved element of UK cultural life to ease the longing for home of the expats upon whom the empire depended.
Here – a century and a half later – I found myself standing on a grassy slope in Topaz Park, looking across a greensward teeming with pipers, drum majors, highland dancers, heavy lifters and hammer throwers (caber tossing was on a different day!) toward the smoky Sooke hills in the background and experiencing suddenly the strongest recollection of sitting on the grass bank at the Pitlochry recreation ground in Perthshire back ‘when I were a lad’, watching the proceedings of a ‘Highland Night’.
It worked a hundred and fifty years ago… it works now!
Some pictures…
In the clan society section I found that my own – Clan Donnachaidh – has made a reappearance after some years missing from the west coast. I signed up – naturally!
“The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes'”
Marcel Proust.*
For each ‘new’ garden (Canadian: yard!) that one inherits there is a marvelous, scary, joyous voyage of discovery – lasting a year – during which time is revealed all that lies concealed within. This earlier post told part of the story of our garden; the images below testify to the fact that there is never (thus far at any rate) a dull moment therein.
* What Proust actually wrote was:
“The only true voyage of discovery, the only fountain of Eternal Youth, would be not to visit strange lands but to possess other eyes, to behold the universe through the eyes of another, of a hundred others, to behold the hundred universes that each of them beholds, that each of them is; and this we can contrive with an Elstir, with a Vinteuil; with men like these we do really fly from star to star.”
In my last post I mused upon the notion that Victoria might just be the best possible place in the world to be an expat Brit. At the weekend just passed we enjoyed a delightful dinner engagement with friends who live downtown. The occasion provided (as so often seems to be the case) yet more evidence in support of whichever conjecture happens to be my current fascination.
Earlier posts in this journal attest to my love of springtime… those hazy blue carpets of bluebells… the lush and fragrant azaleas (particular favourites that I would go out of my way to see)… the keening of the peacocks… Peacocks?! Well, yes – for various reasons I associate them with the sort of country estates to which I used to go in search of bluebell woods and azalea glades.
Anyway – before dinner on Saturday we accompanied our friends on a most pleasant stroll through Beacon Hill Park. I took some snaps:
Now – I am very aware that back in the UK it is not yet quite azalea time. Indeed, should you care to follow any of the links above you will find that all of the posts concerned date from various months of May. Yes – here in Victoria spring comes earlier:
And what can this be?
Of course, Victoria has a few things that are more difficult to find back home:
“To dwell is to garden.”
Martin Heidegger
The weather has at last become more clement and it has been possible to get out into the garden and to start doing all that must be done to wake it from its winter slumbers. I am a gardener only in the sense that I have a garden. I do think – however – that it would have made my father happy to see me tending my (half) acre(s). Yes – you do detect a theme… my father’s birthday would have been at the start of April!
When I got outside these ‘guys’ were already there!
I liked this little sequence of images. The truck crane is used on the smaller islands for building projects and all concerned are so familiar with the procedure that the whole event took less than three minutes – following which tug, barge and truck disappeared in different directions.
Neat!
The Canadian Power Squadron ‘Boating Essentials’ course that is occupying a fair percentage of my time at the moment is fast approaching its culmination. This Sunday last found those of us taking the course – along with our proctors and other members of the Brentwood Bay squadron and of the Royal Canadian Marine Search and Rescue service – participating in the student cruise… an opportunity to put into practice some of the theory that we have been studying these past several months in the classroom.
Courtesy of those generous owners/skippers upon whose vessels we were guests, we started early from Tsehum Harbour, north of Sidney.
The morning was spent working our way slowly north west from Sidney round the head of the peninsula and on towards Cowichan Bay. The object was to enable the students practice navigation the old-fashioned (pre-GPS) way.
Our reward for washing up at the correct location? Hot dogs from the barbecue at Genoa Bay courtesy of the squadron, which – thanks to the excellent tuition we have received throughout – was reached in good time for lunch.
This most welcome repast was followed by an opportunity to learn how to recover an unconscious ‘man overboard’ from the icy waters of the Pacific (kudos to the brave dry-suit clad volunteer from Search and Rescue for allowing herself repeatedly to be pushed into the dock!) before heading for home.
Potential recruits – or just after a ‘dog’?
Tools of the trade!
“The secret of success is to be in harmony with existence, to be always calm to let each wave of life wash us a little farther up the shore.”
Cyril Connolly
On a delightfully balmy mid-February day we parked the car on the outskirts of Sidney and walked along the seafront into the town. It was impossible not to marvel at the beauty of this exquisite enclave in which we are fortunate enough to reside. I therefore make no apologies for placing before the gentle reader – for his or her delectation – some selected snaps of this sumptuous shore.
To Centennial Park in Saanichton the other day for a most pleasant stroll. The park has a deceptively ‘Tardis’ like quality about it and I have driven past it many a time without having the slightest notion of the manifold delights that lie within. On arrival the sky was dark and rain was threatening, so I decided that the Fuji x10 would not be needed and left it in the car. These images were captured instead on the Galaxy S6 – demonstrating quite how rubbish my judgement proved to be on this occasion.
We broke our Boxing Day journey up to snowy Kamloops (where the temperatures continue to be a bracing minus ten celsius!) at Harrison Mills, the which is situated toward the top of the broader part of the Fraser Valley between Mission and Hope (fabulous – no?) before one hits the mountains and takes to the canyon or to the high passes.
We spent a lovely night at Rowena’s Inn on the River which I cannot recommend highly enough to travellers in these parts. This beautiful old lodge is still owned by the Pretty family who built it (their history being revealed in photos throughout the house) and who now run it as a boutique B & B with a really rather good restaurant alongside to boot. Apart from anything else the place is clearly a twitchers’ paradise (see below)!
As ever – here be some photos…
