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..

Our Year In Summary.

As we prepare for our first Christmas on Vancouver Island we wanted to drop a line to our families and friends across the miles to wish you all a wonderful time during the coming festive season. 

Looking back on the year, it's been a mixed bag, one that in some cases came quickly and other times really dragged. 

The quick part was February when handover day was upon us for our Mesquite home purchased by a really nice couple from Colorado Mike and Kathy. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did guys.

The part that dragged was the three months once we had departed the U.S., found a house, made an offer and had it accepted. Living out of suitcases for a further three months while waiting to take possession on our home on Vancouver Island was a real pain but we broke up the time by renting a place for a month only meters away from the home we had just purchased, followed by a further month at a resort 80 kms south and then a short visit back to Calgary to collect our final items.

While we do miss the many friends we have made in Sun City Mesquite we know in our hearts we will see all our friends again relatively soon.  

Of course there are some benefits to not owning a home in the US;

- first we now have the freedom to travel wherever we want instead of feeling we have to go to one particular place every time. Australia, Europe and the Caribbean are still on our bucket list.

- the second and more obvious benefit is that we don't have  the upkeep, heating and cooling costs, homeowner association fees and taxes associated with a second home any longer. 

- last but by no means least the third advantage is that since we started to travel more often and stay away for longer periods we have noticed that the costs of health travel insurance has inched up every year. As you pass the 65 year mark it seems to increase incrementally from there so now, we can avoid those added costs.  

We have spoken to other Canadian Snowbirds who are also noticing the cost of the Travel Health Insurance increases. As a result many of them are travelling less or spending less time down in the US when they do travel in order to lessen the impact of those associated costs. 

Some Snowbirds in our area have told us that this is the last year they will go south for the winter, especially with the dollar being where it is.   

Of course there is still so much more to see south of the 49th parallel and although we have enjoyed our time In Nevada we look forward to visiting other places like New Mexico, Louisiana, South and North Carolina, Tennessee and the Gulf side of Florida which we missed when we visited there before.

I have been in shorts since our arrival on the Island in March. We still enjoy walks around Crown Isle where we live and even now as I write this blog  beginning December 1, It has only been a couple of times I have donned sweatpants to walk in. Some locals are still wearing shorts so we will have to see what January brings.  

During October we drove north to two of the most northerly towns on the Island - Port McNeil a community of 2500 residents and Port Hardy with a population of 4000. It's pretty remote up there to say the least. 

It seems fishing, whale-watching and hunting are some of the things to do there and of course there's lots of natural beauty to take in such as Bald Eagles, Wolves, Cougar, Deer, Bears and much more.  

On our drive up two months ago, we saw a large black bear catching Salmon in a river just a few meters away from the road. The bear was completely impervious to the vehicles passing over the bridge. Now that, is nature at its best.

We still enjoy the Humming birds at the feeder every morning. They will probably remain throughout the winter provided we continue to feed them. They are gorgeous birds especially the males with their iridescent red colouring around their necks that changes colour and flashes when the sunlight hits their feathers at different angles. 

We have dozens of them around our feeder all day every day. Below are a couple. The photo immediately below is a male. The one below that is a female.

Now here's a "Did you know" point of interest.  

Did you know that the hummingbird is the ONLY Bird in the world that can fly backwards AND can fly upside down.

This is a red headed male. The head and throat shine a brilliant iridescent Red in the sunshine

This is a female.  

Tragedy Strikes Vacationers on Vancouver Island.

On October 25 tragedy struck Vancouver Island when five Britons and an Australian drowned as the 60 foot fishing boat taking 27 people out whale watching was breached by a rogue wave.

Some accounts say that the boat had undergone some modifications and many of the people were on the upper deck and over on the port side of the boat which shifted the boat's centre of gravity. 

Locals and passengers say that when the wave came, the unbalanced loading of passengers on the upper deck on the port (left) side as you look forward, made the boat unstable. It tipped and capsized 15 kms north of Tofino off the Island's west coast. 

Our hearts go out to the families back in the UK and Australia who lost family members and friends. It took three weeks to locate the Australian. He was found by people diving on Nov 18. 
  

We are happy to say that as of now we have not purchased a snow shovel and we sincerely hope we won't have to - after all we moved away from Calgary not only to rid ourselves of the crowds, but also to avoid the cold snowy winters. 

We have shot the occasional glances at the snow shovels as we pass by them in the aisles at Home Depot and Canadian Tire but we would really like to try to get through one winter without having to shovel anything. Having never achieved that in the 32 years I have lived in Canada, it might be a tall order to expect anything to change. One can only hope and stay positive.

The locals all tell us that if it does snow, it is normally gone in a day, so we will keep the status quo right now and avoid the temptation to buy a shovel........yet.

November arrived with warm winds and fairly nice weather. All-of-a-sudden Donna's birthday was upon us as she officially became a "Senior Citizen". Hey!  she's OK with it too. Good for her. 

Unfortunately, she fell quite ill on her birthday which was spent huddled in a chair in front of the fireplace - A flu bug we thought. 

She had been given a birthday present by her cousin (a gift voucher for supper at a superb steak house close to home). So that she would enjoy it to the fullest degree possible we held off going until she felt much better. 

One bonus to being a senior is that now, we both get a 50% discount (on the passenger portion only) of BC Ferries Monday to Thursdays because we are now BC residents. 

Actually, I would swap the discounts for some letup in the creaking bones and muscle aches that come with the territory but that's life as they say.

During the rainy days, we have lots of opportunity to work on things we would not normally have time to work on. I like to cook and do the yard work and recently, I built myself a very strong work-bench in the garage. Donna is right at home in her "she cave" making herself clothes on her new sewing machine.

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One thing we do together is to create or rather re-create interesting recipes we find on-line. 

Since we moved into our home in June we have cooked up some tasty morsels and food types such as:



- Various types of breads (including most recently Rye Bread)
- German Rolls (Brötchen)
- Cinnamon Buns
- Ukranian Cabbage Rolls
- Jam
- Candied Jalapeños (often referred to as Cowboy Candy)
- Indian Lime Pickles
- Biriyanis (an Indian Rice and meat dish)
- Pakoras (Indian Vegetables made with delicious spices &   hot peppers)
- Curries
- Home made Samosas (an Indian speciality)
- Home made Pizza
- Original Cornish Pasties.
- The original British Christmas Puddings (giveaways) 

Almost everything worked out well. All in all we are pleased with the results.

My next project is to cook the perfect Paella. We had it when we were in the Dominican Republic and I loved it. 

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With the shopping for Christmas now complete, it is time give some consideration to helping the less fortunate over the Christmas season. 

We have purchased two frozen turkeys. One we will donate to a family or a food bank. We will also see what we can spare out of the pantry to donate to the needy. 

We are thinking that the local food bank might be the way to go so that Christmas Dinner is spread around more evenly on Christmas Day.

Left to Right Bill Mackie, Alan Wills (RIP), Anthony Forbes (RIP), Eddie Humphreys (RIP) and Ken Carter

We were just four NCO's and an Officer who loved the outdoors and mountaineering. We ran the Outward Bound Wing at the Junior Guardsman's Company in Pirbright back in the UK in the 70's. 

My dear friend Eddie Humphreys (green shirt above) and I spent many months and even years walking and climbing together in the mountains of the Canadian Rockies, in the Jottunheim (Norway) and throughout Scotland, England and Wales. 

Eddie passed away earlier this year due to a condition of Lewey Body Disease (a form of Dementia). Ed. was just 66 years old. The disease came quickly and thankfully Eddie did not suffer too much. 

Our thoughts go out to Jackie, Ed's wife and to his son Phil., especially at this time of the year. Best wishes to both of you for what we can only imagine will be a difficult time this Christmas season without your husband and dad. 

Eddie, Rest in peace. Our thoughts are with you all. 

Bill (far left above) and myself (far right) are the only two or the five of us still alive today. Luckily, I was able to locate Bill through a Facebook friend. I found out that Bill lives with his wife Ina in the southern part of the UK. I managed to make contact with them through Facebook just a couple of months ago. Merry Christmas Bill and Ida.

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In closing, we would both like to wish you all sincerely, a wonderful Christmas and a happy, healthy and safe 2016.

Ken and Donna