Here is the European Correspondent's report: "This week I have been introduced to the local ski hill which is located about 20 minutes drive from Nelson just off the main highway about 11km up the ski hill road and considerably higher than town. The summit behind the ski slopes is about 7oooft above sea level. There was still quite a bit of snow about even though the temperature in town was 27 degrees Celcius it was about 5 degrees at the car park. Here I am at the Silver King chair lift.
The ski lodge was a smaller version of the lodges found in the European ski areas and the facility had just two ski lifts. The head of the valley was much narrower than we have experienced in European resorts with the ski lifts being positioned at the top end of where the two sides of the valley come together, like a bowl. Unfortunately as the season here had finished the cafe was closed so no 'caffe und kuchen' again!
The celebration of May Days here in BC incorporated the May Public Holiday for Victoria Day, celebrating the birth of Queen Victoria which meant that the Editor and the Photo Editor had an extra day off work to take me to see the Kaslo May Days celebration. Kaslo is a pretty little village on the northern end of Kootenay Lake about 65km away from Nelson. The picture above is taken from the beach. We went to Kaslo for the Loggers Show and the old and custom car show called the 'show and shine'. The logging was very impressive to someone who hadn't seen this before although thoughts of Risk Assessment for their Health and Safety kept springing to mind. It looked very scary!
We saw a few heats in the competition which was divided into about 20 categories for the events for both men and women, novice, intermediate and experts.
Two of the most memorable were firstly the throwing of a two sided axe at the end of a log marked like a dart board and scoring similarly to darts (except no doubles) and secondly the tree climbing where we saw two guys run up tree trunks which must have been about 100ft tall using a belt and wearing spikes in their shoes. The competition was against the clock, up to the top of the trunks to ring a bell then down to the ground again. The two loggers must have gone up and down in no more than 20 seconds! They were super-fit athletes.
The car show was slightly different to UK car shows as there was a collection of all types of interesting vehicles including veterans, vintage, classics of the 50's, 60's and 70's together with several motor cycles, even a 1936 Francis Barnett.
It was interesting to see the North American approach to showing cars seemed to focus on polished vehicles rather than originality.
Both the logging competition and the car show were free to attend, there were no admission or parking charges which was a refreshing change from the UK. We had a chuckle at the BBQ Roast which was being manned by the Kaslo Fire Department as we were pretty sure that the Fire Chief was in charge of the BBQ."
The weather here has now reached 28-30 degrees Celcius and we have seen the creeks in town fill up with the snow melt from higher up the mountains. Here is a picture of the Big Orange Bridge and Lakeside Park taken from Gyro Park at the weekend.
It is so warm we are now into our summer work 'uniforms' of shorts and t'shirts along with SPF 45 and hats!
We have also got Harley and Phantom in to their new collars which Rachael found in a pet store in Victoria during her recent trip over there for work, they are now sporting rather fetching Harley Davidson collars. Here they are modelling them sat on top of our shed and a close up of the collar.
That is all our news for this week, catch up soon.
Rachael, Shaun, David, Harley & Phantom.
xx
