Spring has Sprung.

Bald Eagles sitting on a tree in Courtenay BC. This is a rare event.

How time flies! Our first winter on Vancouver Island is over, and for the most part it was uneventful. I mean that as a plus inasmuch as it was a heck of a lot warmer than we have been used to back in good old Calgary for the past 30 years. 

In late November and most of December the rain came the likes of which neither of us had seen since returning from our prolonged  stays in Costa Rica and Panama.  

No wonder everything is so green here on the Island during the winter. One lady we spoke to recently told us that it's been the worst winter they have experienced in the eight years since they moved here. If that's the case, we will take it. It was mild compared to Alberta by a long shot.

Winter is now just a figment of the imagination as we enjoy the full majesty and colours of spring. Time to get busy in the garden once again. That suits me fine, as I need to be gainfully occupied when we aren't travelling as much. 

The trees and bushes are all in bloom the daffodils and tulips are resplendent. It's wonderful to see all the colours contrasted with the snow on the mountain that rise high above and to the west of us.  Looking up from our house, we can see the mountains all draped in snow (below).

The view of the mountains taken from our front patio

Our front yard taken in March, ten days before I top-dressed the lawns

The top-dressing on the lawns.  The seeds are up and you can see very little dirt now.

And now, our front yard in full bloom. April 9th. We have three hummingbird feeders on the go which need to be filled regularly

We had decided that this year, in order to offset the rising cost of vegetables and foodstuffs that we would plant a vegetable garden. 

I located a fellow on Facebook who builds raised garden beds locally, emailed him for a quote and three weeks later he had prefabricated the beds, delivered them and set them up in our back yard.  They look really nice and fit in well.

Next I calculated that we required about 4 cubic yards of loam and fish compost mix to fill the two beds with enough left over to top dress all the lawns.  

Not sure if you know what 4 cubic yards looks like but when it arrived and the truck elevated its bed and dumped it on the front drive........ It was a lot.  Worse still, it was wet which made it heavy to load and move.

I got down to relocating it by wheelbarrow and by the end of day two, the job was was completed. We calculated the weight of the loam off a formula we obtained on the internet. I had moved +/- six tons of earth over the two days, a tiring undertaking resulting in my having aches in places I did not know I had.

8'x4'x18" raised Cedar beds now planted up

It's now April 21. The grass seed has germinated, the veggie beds are all planted up and the seedlings are through for the most part.

Mid April I got a call from the Anderton Gardens Therapeutic Society saying I had put my name down for an allotment last year. The lady who called asked if I still wanted an allotment as six had come available? Yes please I said! The allotments are 16'x8', are just a four minute drive from the house and cost just $25 per year. 

Donna and I have planted into the three beds (two at the house and one at the allotment) peas, beans, radishes, two types of onions, two types of lettuce, carrots, three types of potatoes, sweet corn (peaches and cream type), brussels, cauliflower, beetroot and zucchini. We also have tomatoes and strawberries in pots on the front patio. We can't wait to harvest it all.

Just after we had finished planting we decided to throw a "get together party" at our house for the neighbours on our street so we could get to know everyone a little better. We had about 25 people attend. It was great fun. 

We prepared all sorts of food on the Traegar and in the oven. Everyone enjoyed themselves it seems and we benefitted from learning more of the names of our neighbours whom we had spoken to lots on the street whilst working in the yard. Everyone is so friendly here. Most are retired.   

The hosts.

At the end of May, Katherine and her husband Roddy and the two kids, Adam and Amy will come to stay with us for the May long weekend. They fly into Comox airport just a seven minute drive away from the house.  

Kath has rented a van that will accommodate all of us for the journey to the south part of the Island instead of us having to take two vehicles.  

While they are here we will visit the capital city of B.C., Victoria. We have booked a nice hotel in the downtown area by the harbour. We will take as much of it in as we can in the whistle-stop tour including a trip to the world famous Buchart Gardens which are incredibly beautiful all through the year.

It will be a busy weekend but it will be fun. We will try (weather permitting) to take the kids to the beach which is just a ten to fifteen minute drive away.

June is a time I am very much looking forward to as I am off to a fishing lodge on the west coast of Vancouver Island at a place called Nootka - a popular fishing venue. 

I was invited to go by a friend and former client of ours. The three brothers will drive out from Cochrane, Alberta picking me up as they pass through Courtenay. 

The Four of us will make the trip out to Nootka on Vancouver Island's west coast where will stay and hopefully enjoy four fruitful days fishing.

This is Gold River where we will head to Nootka.

We hope to go out and catch some big Halibut and of course, the big Chinook Salmon. Maybe even some Pacific Cod. I have my cooler ready it's massive and I hope I can fill it to the brim with fish. I will report back with pictures if we are successful which hopefully we will be.

A bald Eagle with a Dogfish or as the Brits call it Huss or Rock Salmon in its talons.  Very few Canadians will eat Dogfish.  I have tried to explain to our friends here that 90% of the fish and chip shops in the UK always stock it because it tastes delicious and is very popular among the English.

The usual reaction when I explain to the locals that dogfish (one of the shark species) is a great tasting fish is a sort of pursing of the lips or an outright Ewwwww! Oh well, Not everyone likes everything all of the time but so many of this species of fish here are caught, killed and thrown back into the water to be devoured by seals, eagles and other fish. What a waste of good food.

We have some stunning sunrises at daybreak if you are on the east of the island where we are. Those who live on the west coast catch the gorgeous sunsets in lieu which are just as nice. 

These are some of the nicest skies I have seen since I observed the sunsets over Gibraltar and North Africa when I was there many years ago on a trip to Morocco where I caught the Marrakech Express from Tangiers to Casablanca, eventually arriving in Marrakech. 

I believe the reason we get such fine colours and deep reds is because of the humidity level and the droplets of water in the air. I believe the fine water droplets act as prisms that refract or bend the light. That's my theory anyway. It's a wonderful sight you never quite get over.

This was taken by a young lady who gets out every morning to take in the sunrises with her camera right here in Courtenay, BC

Recently we decided to bite the bullet and complete some renovations which we knew were going to happen. Our ideas were:

1. Install Granite counter tops in the kitchen, the Island and in the main bathroom.
2. Replace the tiled backsplash with subway style glass tiles.
3. Remove the florescent lighting beneath the kitchen cabinets and replace it with LED puck lights that could be dimmed for effect at night wiring them into the mains.
4. Shorten the under cabinet mouldings that hid the larger deeper florescent lighting.
5. Replace the kitchen faucet.
6. Add a large chocolate coloured under-mount Granite sink. 
7. Remove and replace all of the older white appliances for stainless steel ones including the over-the-range microwave. 
8. Replace to older rear projection TV in the "casita" with an HD smart TV.

The first task was to choose Granite which meant a trip to the mainland to tour the Granite suppliers in Vancouver. We wanted to find some vibrant Granite with some visual movement, character and variation in the rock. 

As luck would have it we found exactly what we were looking for in the third suppliers building. We purchased the rock and spent overnight there, travelling back the following day  

We chose two slabs with a Granite and Quartz mix and when inspected more closely one can also see some mica schist which was also present in parts of both slabs which were cut next to each other so they were almost identical.

We purchased two slabs of Granite for the counters both cut one behind the other so were virtually identical.

Job accomplished, we headed home, happy with our choice. The Granite was installed the following week. and appliances followed after that.  

This was the finished product: The granite was planned for and fitted in one piece so there were no seams at all to contend with.

This is a Windmill Palm, the only Palm that will survive on Vancouver Island

according to one of the head Gardeners at Long Lake Nurseries in Nanaimo BC

It never ceases to amaze me that Vancouver Island is covered with Windmill Palms and other types of flora from tropical locations yet this is Canada - one of the coldest countries on earth. 

We are extremely lucky to have the warming temperatures of the Pacific Ocean right on our doorstep yet on the other side of the coast in Nova Scotia, while we are enjoying 26C temperatures, yesterday, Nova Scotia had 30 cm or 1 foot of snow.

We miss the palms having sold our Nevada home so obtaining another palm is something we are thinking of in the future. 

We have planted about four or five different types of Clematis in our yard ranging from pure white to deep purples, moves and pinks integrating them into the same location so they grow as one. 

It makes for an interesting display of colours and types of flowers. They will be in full bloom in the next couple of weeks. 

Something I am doing this year is to plant Clematis adjacent to the Norway Maple we purchased last year. The Norway Maple has variegated leaves. We are training the Clematis plants to climb the trunk and spread along the branches of the maple so that in mid summer we can enjoy a multi-coloured show of a flowering variegated leafed maple hopefully adorned in white, purple, move and pink flowers interspersed with each other. It should look attractive when the task is complete. I will take a picture once everything is up and flowering and post it on Facebook. 

Bananas. Yes, we can very successfully grow banana plants here. In fact we have one now. Amazingly I found out that the banana plant is tolerant to -29C. We are still contemplating where to place it in our yard as it is still on our front patio in a pot growing alongside our tomatoes and our strawberries. 

We don't believe it will produce bananas but the foliage is huge and adds to the luxuriousness of the surrounding greenery.

Thinking back, it is now over a year since we arrived on Vancouver Island. It is hard to believe that time has gone by so quickly. Furthermore we haven't started to make the slightest dent into the places still to visit or do all the things there is to do here. 

We are nearing the three year point when we actually retired. We are both enjoying life in retirement. It's a bit different living off a fixed income but that said, we have found that it makes one look much more closely at how we can stretch every dollar and what we can re-use instead of throwing items away.

We both have to renew our Real Estate Brokers Licences by June if we are to keep them. It's a case of "use it or lose it" so after much debate we both decided to let our licenses go.  

We just aren't prepared at this stage in our lives to turn everything upside down showing property, sitting open houses and negotiating deals late into the night in such a wonderful place so we have decided to enjoy what time we have left while we have the health to do so.

A trip to Australia is still on our bucket list which might happen over the next year or two. We nearly have enough air miles to make the trip so maybe if we can rent out our home here for enough and to the right type of people, we will take some time and head down to Australia for a maybe three to six months. 

What we would like to do is to fly to San Francisco and break the journey there (maybe even Hawaii), then fly the rest of the way down to Sydney.

We have friends down in Nevada who expressed an interest in accompanying us (for a part of the time) if and when we go. That would be fun. Lots of planning to do for that trip as we would really like to circumnavigate the whole continent.   

Everyone is back into shorts again here. The sun is shining most of the time and often there's not a cloud in the sky.  The furnace is rarely on now, in fact, yesterday was 26C and when I awoke this morning, it was raining but the outside temperature was still 16C but still 20C inside our home at 7:00 am. Yes, summer is just around the corner.  

In closing, we are thankful having visited Ecuador two years ago that we did not select that country to retire to for many reasons (none of which was the threat of earthquakes) but do think about all those unfortunate, wonderfully pleasant people who have lost their lives in the devastating earthquakes over the past few days. 

It certainly makes one aware that we should all make to most of what we have when one sees thousands of locals and visitors in dire straits down there right now trying to recover from property damage, losses and family bereavement.

We too, live in an area where the tectonic plates are colliding and the threat of something happening on the San Andreas Fault which runs from Alaska, down the coast of Western Canada and the United States makes us aware and grateful that we have been lucky not to have the same problems. We can only hope we never have to suffer that type immense devastation and loss as the poor souls in Ecuador and Japan have done so recently.

With that said, we will sign off and bid you all adieu. Stay safe everyone.

Ken and Donna 

PS. Please forgive some of the idiosyncrasies of this program I am using to blog.  It has a couple of bugs that I have tried to remove but for some reason, it won't comply with my commands, that's why you see extra spaces or different sized fonts in a couple of places..