A Real Piece Of England Over In Victoria

Look what I spotted at the Harbour yesterday - a Victorian Mini, there seems to be a lot of the cars that we are used to seeing in the UK. Plenty of BMWs especially Z4 and minis, Audi, VW Beetles and plenty of Land Rovers.

This weekend has been very busy in Victoria with the Floating Boat Show at the Inner Harbour. The training department at work kindly arranged for us to have a three day pass which enabled us to go and marvel at the huge boats and even go on board for a look. I went aboard a 30' boat which had a kitchen, bathroom, dining area and 2 berths. It was very nice but may have been a bit over the top for Kootenay Lake! I had an exciting day on Friday when I had to go back to mainland Vancouver for a meeting. The quickest way to get from Downtown Victoria to Downtown Vancouver was by sea plane which took 35 minutes each way. Having never been on plane any smaller than a 36 seater I was quite nervous of the whole trip however, it turned out to be a fantastic experience, so much better than usual planes. I think it was the smoother take off and landing on the water that made the difference. It was a very sunny day and there was no low cloud which meant that there was no turbulance. This is from take off looking back at Victoria.

This is arriving at Vanouver Harbour Air with the sky scrapers in the shot. If you look closely you can see the sea planes in the fore ground. Finally one of my favourite touristy pictures of the Parliament Building at night.

It has been raining today although still quite bright and cheery.This week coming is the second week of my training course and I head back to Nelson on Thursday ready to pick up our Guest Editor who is flying in from the UK and shall be with us for three weeks.

We shall introduce him next week.
Bye for now,
Rachael in Victoria and the Boys in Nelson

Hello From Victoria

The blog is here - panic over! It is late, well actually very late this week. For the next two weeks I am over in Victoria on Vancouver Island. I am over here doing some training for my new job and taking in some sights whilst I am here too. In the absence of the Photo Editor who has remained over in Nelson to man the fort and look after the boys, I have been out around the Inner Harbour with the camera. For those of you who have been here before I hope they remind you of a great vacation. This is the Harbour at dusk yesterday evening.

The weather is like an English Springtime and all the tulips, daffs and spring flowers are out and really colourful. This is the Parliament Building including the harbour and boats with the flowers in the garden which spell out "Welcome To Victoria".

I am also heading back over to Vancouver on Friday for a day trip and I have booked a flight with Harbour Air on one of the sea planes. I couldn't resist posting a picture for you and if you would like to check out their fleet click the link. I think the planes seat from 2 to 14 people which given my slight dislike of flying could be quite interesting.

This is the famous Empress Hotel which sits at the head of the Harbour. Unfortunately I am not staying in that hotel but I do have a harbour view from my balcony.

Finally, here is a picture of the Parliament Building looking pretty with the lights on.

Looking back over the past week we have experienced some very strange weather in the Kootenays. You will remember we wrote that we had temperatures of around 20 degrees a couple of weeks ago well last weekend we were back to 2 degrees Celcius and the day before I flew out to Victoria we had 4" of snow in Nelson which is very unusual for the area.

Luckily I managed to make both my flight from Castlegar to Vancouver then Vancouver over to Victoria. The latter flight was really funny as it only took 21 minutes from start to finish certainly no time for a trolley service, which is possibly a good thing.

That is all for this week but I shall post more next Sunday ready for all you folks who like to read the blog at work on a Monday morning.

Rachael (in Victoria), Shaun & Harley & Phantom (in Nelson)

Summer - already?

It is 7pm on Sunday evening and we have just finished renovating our back deck. It needed some trellis fitting underneath to stop the cats and other little creatures from getting in there and using it as a litter tray! As you can see from the picture above there is no way any creatures can get under there not even our local raccoon whose footprint we caught on the deck earlier this week; he is called Raymond the raccoon.

We are sat outside with jeans and t'shirts on relaxing with a well earned glass of vino rosso. We have had temperatures of between 20 and 22 degrees Celcius this weekend so it seems like summer has suddenly arrived. What a change from last weekend when we were enjoying the last of the skiing as it was snowing! We have decided that we seem to have hit upon our own micro climate here in Nelson - we can certainly recommend moving to southern BC just to escape the rain!

Going back to the topic of DIY it has been almost 3 years since we did any DIY at our old house Strathlea, and therefore this weekend came as somewhat of a shock. After much deliberating on the job, which we blame this on the lack of our usually reliable Mr Dix who helped out on numerous DIY occasions, and also helped us to polish off many bottles of beer in the process, we managed to get going and complete the task in hand.

However, we need to report that Shaun's nickname of Dangerous Dave has definitely followed him to Canada. Just a few cuts into the job he managed to slice his hand using the saw. Here is a picture showing Rachael's first aid skill at using Steristrips.

Phantom helped out around the home again this week when Rachael was watering the plants in the kitchen sink. Here he is about to pick up the watering can - what a clever kitten!

Not to forget Harley who is usually quite camera shy, we managed to get this picture of him to share with you. This is our big ginger pussy cat.

That is all for this week we look forward to catching up again soon.

Rachael, Shaun, Harley and Phantom

The Whitewater Slush Cup

We enjoyed the final weekend of fun at the ski hill for this season. Although it was the last few days we still had 20 cm of fresh snow to ride. Our final 'scores on the doors' for days at the hill are Shaun with 42 and Rachael with 53 days, that is from 8th December when the season started here. Not bad use of our season passes really. This weekend was the Whitewater Beach Party when folks dressed up in beach clothes and there were even speedo shorts and bikinis!

The best event of the weekend was The Whitewater Slush Cup. This involved competitors heading as fast as possible down the slope toward a huge deep pool of iced water. The aim of the game was to get across the pool without falling in. This picture is the scene before the excitement began.

Here is the Judo Kid who was the first to make it across the pool to huge cheers from the crowd.

This is one of the first snowboarders who wasn't really wearing an awful lot, he managed to take the jump and then headed straight in to the cold water.

Then believe it or not this guy was wearing a pink tutu and luckily his left ski is covering his modesty for us!

So as locals here like to ask "what are you going to do now for your crossover sport?" well we are going to get back to hiking with some of our friends who have lived in Nelson for over 15 years so know the local area well. We shall be rock climbing as soon as the weather warms up and the snow on the mountains disappears. In the meantime Shaun has designs on building a climbing den in the garage and we will get our bikes out. We may even have a go at kayaking on the lake when the very warm weather arrives.

Today we have news that the Ice Mountain outside our house has finally melted. At its highest it stood about 6 feet tall after the snow diggers had cleared the roads and piled up the snow. Now we just have a rather sad pile of sand and salt leftover. At this time of the season you are asked to brush all sand and salt in to the roads to allow the City's clean up wagons to come along and sweep it up to recycle for next year. Guess that is a little job for the weekend.

Here is a picture of Harley our ginger kitten doing some gardening for us, think he was pretending to sunbathe whilst waiting for a mouse to come out of the wall.

That is all for this week but you may be pleased to hear that we have finally stopped praying to the snowgods so hopefully you won't see too much more snow in Blighty - oops sorry about that!

Love Harley, Phantom, Shaun & Rachael