Vacation!!!

Yes, it has been a while... and at first it was due to the busy-ness, but that can't be our excuse for the past 2 weeks because we've been on a fantastic vacation!! We stopped in Winnipeg to visit friends and family for a few days before continuing to Vancouver for our west coast holiday. Charlie's grandparents are both turning 80 this year, so we had a weekend away, a couple hours from Winnipeg, to celebrate the event. Besides the flies and mosquitos, which I have very little tolerance for, it was an awesome weekend.

Our time in B.C. with Christa has been incredible. So I don't keep you for too long, I'll just outline some of the highlights.


1. We spent one day on Granville Island and then walked through Stanley Park and really saw how absolutely awesome it would be to live in Vanouver! Urban living + beach + forest = yes please!

2. After a few days in Van, we loaded up a car that had been generously loaned to us and drove across Vancouver Island to Tofino for a week of camping. On the drive there we stopped many times to hike and explore. Our favourite stops were to Englishman River Falls near Nanaimo and Cathedral Grove near Port Alberni. Cathedral Grove has its name because it is a forest of 70-80
meter-tall cedars and firs that are hundreds of years old. The pics to the right: Charlie jumping into the FREEZING cold water at the bottom of the falls; he swam back to shore with a traumatised look on his face! and "tree-hugging" in Cathedral Grove!

3. In Tofino, we did a combined whale watching and hot springs tour in Clayoquot Sound. Not only did we see whales (greys and orcas) we saw a family of orcas chase, kill and eat a harbour porpoise. See the picture below for the kill moment! The hot springs were so great, we didn't want to leave. We hiked a short distance in the rainforest (did you know Canada actually has the most productive rainforest in the world?) to get there and the boiling hot springs were the best shower we got all week!


4. We hiked a lot in the Pacific Rim National Park Reserve and fell in love with everything. The highlight of those hikes, though, was when we happened upon none other than a WILD COUGAR on one of the beaches and escaped unscathed! We were walking down a long set of stairs to one of the beaches at the end of a hike, discussing how grueling it would be to climb back up them, when Charlie whisper-shouted (if that's possible), "Stop!" just as Christa was about to jump the last few steps out of the tree line and onto the beach, and there it was! About 50 feet away and quite large, it was wandering the waterfront. And then we found out how fast we could climb stairs at the end of a hike, but not before it turned our way, looked right at us and took a few steps in our direction. Oh yeah, and Charlie got a picture!

When we got back to car, we caught our breath, slowed our heartrates, and promptly looked up what to do when faced with a cougar (something we maybe should have done before going on the hike). We reported it to an impressed park ranger who told us we were very lucky (not to have survived, but to have spotted the cougar!) and that out of about 1.1 million visitors to the area per year, only about a dozen or so ever see a cougar. It is also Canada's only completely carnivorous animal, and if it had wanted to eat us it would have succeeded. Crazy!