Category: Canada

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Skiing on Vancouver Island

We have just came back from the last skiing trip of the season, and coincidentally, I’ve finished sorting through the video footage from our first trip of this year (see below). The 2023-24 season at Mt. Washington started really slowly. During our first visit, just before Christmas of 2023, the was so little snow that we were constantly concerned that the resort would close. Only a couple of trails were open, and it was raining a lot. I didn’t even shoot any video because of the poor visibility. Still, we ended up skiing every day and enjoyed the change of scenery. 

During the second trip, which we took right after the New Year, the conditions improved a lot.

Take a look!

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Snow days

It is easy to distort reality with the stories we tell ourselves and the memories we form by doing so. For example, I’ve been living in Victoria sufficiently long to somehow assume that winter almost never comes here. “Six months of spring, six months of autumn,” is how I like to describe local wether to friends who don’t live here. When we went on sabbatical in 2017, we missed a heavy snowfall, and thought that it was our unique chance to see snow around our house in years. But as we were heading out to play in the snow this weekend, my nine-years-old daughter happily remarked that so far it snowed in Victoria every year of her life. That is, actually, a fact, and we even have photos to prove it. I thought that it was good to get calibrated in how I view the place I live at and generally, how we spend our lives. Not that mild winters is something to complain about to begin with, but if we look closely, we don’t even have a reason to fret about being deprived of snow days. Those are short lived, but we made most of them this year – sledding at a local hill, having a snowball fight with Bruno, our dog, and building a fortress in the front yard. Now, it looks like it will all melt away just in time for the start of school tomorrow.

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Christmas lights in Victoria

COVID had a huge impact on the Holiday festivities in Victoria. Basically, there were no festivities. Some of our favourite things, like ice-skating and watching the light-up at Butchart Gardens, were not possible this year – everything was cancelled and closed. On the other hand, it seems that individual people had stepped up and decorated their houses beyond what they would typically do in a more normal year. We took advantage of that and drove around the city on Christmas night to see these DIY designs.

We followed a map that someone had created on Google, which showed the most prominent light-up attractions. We spent a couple of hours driving along the route that I made up using a lot of guess work, because the online map didn’t offer any details except a bunch of pins indicating the decorated houses. Upon consideration, I noticed that they were clustered in groups throughout the city, probably because the peer pressure of neighbours putting up the lights pushed the other people in the same neighbourhood to follow suit.

I took my camera, but because it was pouring rain (and because I was lazy), I took most of the pictures without leaving the car. By the time we reached downtown, the rain had stopped, so we parked, walked around shot a few photos of the completely deserted Inner Harbour and the Parliament Building, also illuminated. I also took a picture of the new “Blue bridge” from the Esquimalt side – something that I wanted to do a long time ago, but never found the time.

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Smoky skies

We’ve had seriously smoky air in Victoria over the past few days because of the forest fires in the neighbouring Washington state. The level of pollution varies a bit day-to-day, depending on the wind direction and speed. On the first day of my daughters school year, we went outside to take obligatory back-to-school photo, and the light was beautiful. The wind blew some more smoke in over the day, and the children were moved indoors during the recess. This didn’t dampen my daughter’s enthusiasm about being re-united with her friends after six months consisting of the the Coronavirus lockdown in March followed by a rather socially isolated summer holiday.

IQAir screenshot

Today, I took our dog for a walk earlier than usual, hoping that the mist rising off the soccer pitch where we usually go would trap the smoke particles. The air did seem quite fresh at first, but as it warmed up, the fog disappeared, and the smoke came in, so we didn’t stay out for long. A teacher in me made a mental note to use this as an example of psychrometrics in the thermodynamics class that I am going to teach (yet again remotely) next term.

They say the Earth is healing because of COVID-induced slowdown of human activity. Naturally, there are good things about forest fires too,.. once we look back at them as things of the past.

So I think the my daughter’s smoky first school day photo represents our mood in this crazy year quite well – we are still well and somehow remain positive despite being continually reminded that what’s going on in the outside world is utterly beyond our control.

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Salmon run video

I have just finished sorting through a bunch of video footage that my wife, daughter and I shot while watching a salmon run at Goldstream Park, which is just outside Victoria along Highway 1. Checking the date stamps of the files, I found that we went there almost exactly on the same day of the year – on November 11 and 12 in 2017 and 2018. It’s a good time of year to see the salmon run. Although the timing of this mysterious natural event varies from year to year, early November gives you a reasonable chance to see a lot of fish while not being nauseated by the smell of their decaying corpses. That would be the unavoidable scene later in the season, typically sometime in December.

I first saw a salmon run at the exact same place, in Goldstream Park, when we moved to Victoria. It had a tremendous affect on me. In fact, the second blog post I’ve ever written was about the salmon run. I felt like I was in the middle of some incredibly important event, and yet, I didn’t know what it was, exactly. It was so significant that thousands of animals were single-mindedly participating in it, paying no attention to the humans with their pathetic efforts to explain what was happening as a  purely zoological phenomenon. Biology aside, what these powerful fish demonstrated was an unmistakable and tremendous sense of collective purpose. Perhaps unconscious, but a powerful will nonetheless. And I could only stand there and marvel at it, realizing that I was given a glimpse into something mysterious and so primal that thousands of animals move like a single organism to die for it.
Since then, we try to see the salmon run every year, and every time it moves me emotionally.

Back in 2017, when most of this footage was shot, my then seven-year-old daughter was keen to help with the underwater filming by sticking a GoPro into the shallow stream next to the huge fish fighting for breeding grounds. That was before she discovered that she could talk into the camera, imparting to the world her opinion on every subject that enters her sphere of attention, like any good blogger should. So this is, perhaps, one of the last videos where she is mostly quiet. Enjoy.

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Botanical Beach

Panoramic view of Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.

We haven’t been to Botanical Beach since 2013. My daughter was two years old then. We wanted to make it a fun outing, so I rode my motorbike, and my wife and daughter followed in a car. This time, the whole family rode in the car, including my parents. We stopped to stretch our legs in Jordan River at the appropriately-called Cold Shoulder Cafe (they had no bathrooms and no decaf coffee, which is the only kind my father can take.) Otherwise, it’s a perfectly located pit stop between Victoria and Port Renfrew, where Botanical Beach is.
The distance to Botanical Beach from our home in Victoria is 270 km (round trip.) It’s just long enough to make it a significant excursion, so we don’t go there too often. It is a famous destination for Southern Vancouver Island, and when we just moved to Victoria, we learned early on that timing is important for planning a visit there. The tide needs to be low enough (around 1.5 m or lower) to be able to fully enjoy the tidal pools – the main attraction of this unique place. If you arrive at the beach at high tide, you miss the magic of walking on the exposed oven floor and peeking into the pools that are full of marine flora and fauna. It would be just another beautiful West Coast beach – something that we get de-sensitized to by living in Victoria. The problem is that the lowest tides often occur at an inconvenient time – either too early in the morning or too late at night to fit into a single-day sightseeing itinerary. This time, on a weekend in mid-June, the timing was on our side – the (relatively) low tide was at the middle of the day, so we could take a leisurely drive to the beach.

Panoramic view of Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.

From the parking lot in Port Renfrew, we meant to take the easiest route to the ocean, worrying that it could be difficult for my parents to scramble across tree roots on the trail. Having not been there for seven years, we miscalculated and took a relatively more difficult trail. It was a lucky mistake, though, because the parents managed the walk well,  and it took us directly to the most picturesque part of the beach.
My daughter was delighted by the extraordinary scenery. She spent all the time documenting her impressions on a GoPro. This is her camera of choice these days for recording footage for her soon-to-be-established vlog (a new hobby, spurred by the sharp increase of screen time during remote schooling during the COVID lockdown.) I also carried photo gear – a Sony a7RIV with two lenses (a 70-200 mm and a 24-70 mm) and another GoPro (stay tuned for some videos from inside the tide pools!) It is funny that every time I visit Botanical Beach, I feel compelled to go into photography mode, because the place is so uniquely beautiful. But sinse I go there sufficiently rarely, the technology develops so much that every time my photos are better simply because I have better gear. In a strange way, it feels both good and humbling at the same time.

A woman, a girl and their dog are looking at tidal pools at Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.

Panoramic view of Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.

Tidal pools at Botanical Beach. Port Renfrew, BC, Canada.

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Paddle boarding at Cadborough Bay

This weekend, my daughter and I took our paddle boards to the ocean for the first time this year. The water was surprisingly warm (no, we didn’t fall down), and the trip itself, as short as it was, didn’t disappoint in terms of the sights one can only see from the water: sunken boats, uninhabited islands… The former was only a stone’s throw from the shore and the latter was only thirty meters or so across, but we‘ll take them. My wife and Bruno, our puppy, were keeping an eye on us from the beach, although Bruno made an honest attempt to join us in the water.

We shot some footage with two GoPro cameras, one on each paddle board. If nothing else, it gave us some good material for a movie-making project the following day, which fits nicely in the current theme of remote education (read: finding a way of entertaining a child at home and justifying it from an educational standpoint by hoping that she might learn something in the process). Seriously though, we all felt that shooting and putting together the video somehow enhanced the whole paddle boarding experience.

Check out the result:

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Polite pedestrians

When my parents first visited Victoria, they were pleasantly surprised and even mildly inconvenienced by the fact that the local drivers were too polite. When my parents would be walking around town, the cars would often stop to allow them to cross the road (which they felt obliged to do, even though they were not planning to).

A couple of days ago I was riding my motorbike for the first time in 2020, taking advantage of a dry, sunny day. And I realized that the local pedestrians reciprocate the politeness – several of them stopped at the crosswalks and waved me though, presumably to save me stopping and changing gears.

It’s a small thing, but that’s why I like Victoria. “It is so civilized,” as one colleague said when we moved to live here. Besides, being able to ride a motorbike in January end even enjoy the sunshine is a real treat. Check it out:

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Best part of travel

“What is your favourite part of travel?” asked my eight-years-old daughter, who was eager to start packing for our skiing trip over the Christmas holiday.

I wasn’t sure I understood what she meant. Obviously, I like the skiing part, but I had a sense that it wasn’t what she was aiming at.

“My number-one favourite thing is packing,” she explained. “Second is arriving to the hotel room, and driving there is the third-favourite part
I am pretty sure “third-favourite” really meant “the part that could be skipped without missing much”.

I thought about my own order of preferences. I agree with her that anticipation is a large part of the overall experience. Planning of a trip is at least half of the fun, or at least it could be so. Unfortunately, for me there is often not enough time to enjoy the planning phase, to slow down and do it methodically. Packing is a perfect example. More often than not I scramble to do it at the last moment, and so it becomes a chore. Indeed, whatever is worth doing is worth doing slowly.

I find it amusing how much my daughter enjoys the novelty of the new environment. That’s her number two on the list of favourite aspects of travel. Playing in the hotel’s pool and being able to build a “royal bed” by collecting all the pillows she could find erased even the momentary sadness of saying goodbye to Bruno, our puppy, who is staying with his breeder during our trip.

For me, it’s the people we come across one way or another during the travel that ultimately make the experience what it is. Debbie, Bruno’s breeder, for example, had her hands full with a litter of puppies, yet she accepted him without hesitation at our first request. I really hope that Bruno’s first Christmas will be more enjoyable in the company of his original family than sitting in a crate while we go skiing. I somehow suspect he would not have shared my daughter’s enthusiasm about our hotel room.

On the way to skiing, I ran into my kendo sensei in a cafeteria. Two minutes of face-to-face chat to catch up about the kids and the parents, sharing our pride in their achievements and concerns about their health felt like being reassured that someone still shares your values and cares about your going-ons beyond a Facebook “like”. Watching us talk, my daughter suddenly became sad that I put kendo on hold in the past year in order to pursue other things together with her. And I became a bit sad that she is becoming a bit more grown-up every day, right before my eyes.

Then, there was a family from Brazil, whom we met at the pool. They live in Victoria as part of their sabbatical. Their experience of this part of the world was so positive that it reminded me how much of it I’ve come to take for granted. The hedonic treadmill is a tough thing indeed.

And the family time in the company of my daughter, wife and parents – being able to experience it in the context of travel, even if it’s short three hours away from home, is definitely a treat.

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Mt. Doug

A Saturday afternoon walk turned out into the first legitimate hike for both my daughter and our Lagotto Romagnolo puppy Bruno. We just started climbing past our usual turnaround point on the trail and soon found that it was easier to continue scrambling up against the little water currents running towards us on the rocks than to turn back and follow their flow. Soon the sweeping views of Victoria started opening up and my daughter, who minutes ago was vocally regretting her decision to go on this hike, was delighted at having made it to the top. While we were crab-walking along a slippery rock on our way down, Bruno was zooming up and down the muddy slope as some kind of mountain goat. “He is in heaven!” said my daughter, and he certainly looked like he was beside himself with excitement. It took three water changes when we gave Bruno a bath at home to wash off all the mud. And this is saying something, because he usually goes to a great length to avoid stepping into puddles or even on wet grass. (Some water dog he is!)