All these things that I have done

1) Tofino has almost no internet! Well, the place we were staying didn't have internet in our room (although I think they did in their main building), and only some of the eateries did and then not very reliably. Thus, I have been absent from the internet for several days. Did you break anything? I found this to be not serene and peaceful, but rather irritating and it tended if anything to make me more antisocial as I tried to get an internet connection while we were eating dinner instead of when I was on my own. Basically, internet is good.

2) On the other hand, what Tofino did have was BEARS!! Yes, I have been out on the BEAR boat and watched BEARS wandering along beaches turning over stones looking for crabs and other morsels. They were very charming creatures and quite happy to just ignore us even though we were very close - I guess being on the water meant that they treated us differently. We also saw a rock on the way back that was just a rock, and just a rock and then suddenly we got close enough to realise it was covered in seals.



3) We also spent a very pleasant afternoon in the Tofino botanical gardens, which were lovely. A short wander through some different plantings and some old growth woodland onto the sea shore to gaze across the mud flats (full of migrating birds at other times of the year, nice and peaceful now). There was a slight tendancy to whimsey in some of the points of interest along the self guided trail but it was a lovely place to spend an afternoon (and had actual working internet in the cafe!).






4) Tofino has no Tim Hortons. I am not sure if this means that it is not really in Canada. Probably. It does have the prettiest cat we have met in BC thought (note careful categorization, elyssa and stevieg!).


5) For this drive from and back to Victoria, we hired a convertible because I love driving with the top down. On the way out it was cloudy and fairly cold, and on the way back, it was pouring nearly all the way. Of a total drive time of around 6 hours, we managed to have the top down for a total of about half an hour. Still, I'd rather have it that way around than have the bear trip rained off, so I guess it all worked out ok.

Hello world! Well, it's about one third of the way through our trip to Canada and we have finally found a hotel that gives decent wifi access! Both the past two places kept dropping my connection every 2 minutes or so - not ideal for browsing the modern web, as I'm sure you can imagine :) Still, we have been having a great time so far, only slightly hampered by some less than spectacular weather. We managed a couple of lovely days in Banff, during which I climbed an actual mountain! Check out the view from the top!


Unfortunately, this wasn't the Burgess Shale mountain, and we decided that the lack of ability to maintain our own pace meant that wasn't going to work that well for me so we went on the shorter GeoScience walk experience where we got to open up some shale and find actual trilobytes! Yes, I have found my very own trilobyte, which is pretty awesome. After Banff, we went on to Golden, on the Kicking Horse River, which was really nice, and we went to see the wolf sanctuary and the grizzly bear sanctuary! We've also seen elk grazing on the highway and three deer, one while walking and two while on the road, so the wildlife spotting is going pretty well so far. We had been planning to stop next in Kamloops, but the nice waitress we were chatting to in Golden suggested that we might enjoy wine country and so we have diverted down to Kelowna, where we have unfortunately brought the rain with us, but have managed to find a nice place to stay with the aformentioned quality wifi :)





By the way, I can't tell if these images are only showing up in preview because I'm logged into google, so if you can't see them, comment and tell me!

Have had a very up and down week this week for some reason - easily discombobulated by little things at school and so on. Thank goodness for the Easter holidays, although I will be spending most of the first week at school anyway, either teaching booster classes for SATs or sorting out our new ICT suite.

I have discovered the fact that you can go on guided hikes of the Burgess Shale and really want to do one while we're in Canada so we've started going on weekend walks this month - well, we've managed two so far, anyway :) It's been rather nice so far, but my hiking boots just aren't really comfortable so I'm trying out some less heavy duty footware, in the hope that I can find something that's rather more natural feeling. We are going to need to find some hills to practice on though, given the elevation of the hike I'd like to do! At the moment, what we find is that I can walk quite comfortably without getting out of breath for about 3 miles on the flat but as soon as you add height gain, I start to get puffed in my breathing, which then goes away again as soon as you get back on the flat. Alex suggested it might be something in my stance, so that'll give me some more googling to do! Still, if I can repeat the hill part of todays walk about 11 times, that would be about equivalent, and that doesn't sound crazy. We'll have to see how things go.

So, here we are in the colonial territories :) Seriously though, part one of the Canadialand holiday is almost complete. We had a ludicrously long Tuesday between getting up early to get the plane and then flying about 6 hours back but we managed enough cat naps on the way to enjoy a lovely evening with elyssa and stevieg, where we had steak, or rather STEAK, because much of Canada seems to invite excessive capitalisation, so far. It was seriously good steak though, and just what I needed after the anaemic plane food and enjoyed in excellent and convivial company. We then headed back to their current abode to stroke cats and play Cards Against Humanity. I won, which I think makes me the worst person there, right?

The next step was to start out across the Rockies. We had decided not to book rooms in advance for this stage of the trip, so that we could play things by ear a little. This meant that we had the flexibility to take the advice of the very friendly Canadian lady we met in the immigration queue and drive on up to Jaspar, rather than stopping in Banff. This was an extra couple of hours in the car, but boy were they impressive hours. There were MOUNTAINS, and more MOUNTAINS, and BLUE LAKES of ridiculous, unrealistic colour. We stopped for a wander around Bow Lake, which was pretty amazing - you could see the glacier making its way down the side of the mountain opposite. We had intended to take an evening walk but actually, once we were there and had eaten, I was pretty knackered so we just crashed out in our hotel.

Next came the other half of the Rockies drive, to Hope, a town I had picked purely based on driving distances as a sensible place to stop. We did consider stopping and doing a little trail walking on the way, but the midday sun dissuaded us and so we enjoyed the grandeur of the MOUNTAINS from the car this time. Once in Hope we had thought of walking a little trail there but by now we had arrived in rainy country. The mountain here is under an ominous wreath of misty cloud and when we couldn't figure out a way to safely walk from our motel to the trail head as the grass verge petered out, we decided to substitute a wander around town instead, which proved very enjoyable in its own way. We discovered that Hope has lots of motels in various states of seedy looking, closed down shops, masonic lodges (seriously, there was a whole block of them) and a surprising number of Chinese/Canadian restaurants, a cuisine we decided to pass over on this occasion in favour of a rather nice classy restaurant next door to our motel. There were also lots and lots of chainsaw carvings all over town, as we had just missed the annual chainsaw carving competition. These range from the banal to the frankly bizarre but the drizzle, the roaring river and the whole abandoned small town air definitely made for an interesting exploratory walk around before dinner. Also, I have decided based on this visit that the difference between a motel and a hotel is that you get a slightly bigger room.

Next we're off to Victoria where we have what looks like a very nice hotel room booked - each room has a name in this place and ours is the Reading Room! I'm trying to upload each day's photos to flickr as I go (otherwise I'll never get around to it) so if you like that sort of thing, check out http://www.flickr.com/photos/tinyjo. Otherwise, I'm sure I'll post again once we're settled in Victoria.