Partying in paradise

So I've been struggling to sit down and write this week's blog not because of lack of inspiration, but I have simply been far too busy and important! No, not really, probably just a combination of laziness and great summer weather to be honest. It's pretty tough to be all dorky on the computer when you can be outside in the sun. Thankfully my skin has finally shed its scaly translucent luster and is somewhat normal once again (if only momentarily!).

In other news, this week my work hosted an island themed picnic in Stanley Park on Wednesday afternoon so we all got to leave the office at 11am and spent the afternoon eating, playing games and learning Hawaiian and Tahitian dance. Despite my inherent distaste for dancing, it was actually pretty fun. The other great work news is that I had some really positive feedback on my work from the big boss and he wants me to apply for a full time EA position coming up in September. Hooray!

In Steven-work related news, last week he spent four days in the Northwest Territories at a place called Yellowknife, where his company owns a local plane business. Tough for some! Interestingly, his boss warned him to check the weather a day or two before he left just to make sure they weren't expecting any freak snow storms (in the middle of summer!!) It's actually the place where they film the TV show 'Ice Road Truckers' ... if you've heard of it... (basically it's a show about truckies that have to drive these big semi trailers over ice covered roads - yep, exactly what it sounds like!). Anyway, he had a great time and was apparently quite a novelty for the locals!

So last weekend was Dave's birthday and his girlfriend Liz invited a few of us to her family's cabin at Loon Lake - approximately 5 hours drive north east of Vancouver. Needless to say we spent the majority of the five hour journey making jokes about how crazy this would be back home - driving five hours to Bundaberg to celebrate a friend's birthday when we often balk at driving an hour or less to the coast! The major difference between the drive from Vancouver to Loon Lake and the drive from Brisbane to Bundy is quite clearly the epic scenery - I was completely in awe of the grandeur of the mountains we drove through - impossible to describe but they completely dwarfed our car and made me feel so small. Even in the darkness their majesty was humbling. My mesmerisation was briefly interrupted twice - once when we spotted a baby bear (that's #2 for me, #4 for Steven - dammit!) and then when we almost hit Bambi's mother who ran right in front of our car (much to my relief Dave broke well in time).

Our view!

The Loon Lake house

Some scenery on the way home

More scenery on the drive home - note the snow still on the mountains in the middle of summer!!

Before we even made it to Loon Lake we had a little trouble culling our 'essential items' for the two day trip. With Steve planning to fit in some training, plus groceries and alcohol, we had pretty much packed the entire contents of our tiny little house. As most of you would know I do enjoy a good list and I try my utmost to incorporate this list making habit into every facet of my life - holiday packing is no exception -

Nat's stuff

Nat's comprehensive list

So when I arrived home on Friday afternoon, I had to laugh when I noticed my list making had managed to infiltrate Steven's conscious stream of disorganisation -

Steve's stuff

Steve's comprehensive list

Loon Lake is incredibly gorgeous and unbelievably peaceful. It was well and truly the most relaxed place I have visited since I have been in Canada. When I thought it couldn't get any better, it well and truly cemented itself into my good-books when I spent Saturday morning eating breakfast sitting beside two friendly ducks and a brace of ducklings! Alvin, Simon and Theodore even joined us for lunch later in the day! I was so impressed with the chipmunks and I couldn't believe how tiny (about the size of a large mouse) and quick they are in real life! 

My little duckling friends

Very tame wildlife!

The view - pretty impressive!!

The beautiful Lola - token lake house dog

Chippy!

Feeding the ducks

More chippies!

So cute - check out their cute little hands (paws?)

Saturday we spent doing a whole 'lotta nothing and it was fabulous! With gorgeous sunny weather and an average of 27 degrees, we made the most of the cabin's prime lake location and chilled out canoeing and lazing around on inflatable pool toys, with a few beverages for good measure. Dave was also thrilled with his present - a BB gun (apparently they're illegal in Australia) - and so were we - taking turns shooting empties balancing precariously in various locations (I gave it the 'ok' after confirming the bullets were biodegradable and no animals were or were ever going to be harmed in the activities - this BB gun was purely for beer can related fun). In case you're wondering - it was a requirement of the weekend that we wear our party hats for the duration of our stay!

Steve sucking it up before diving into the chilly water

The Dave's go for a paddle on the pride floaty!

Chilling in the lake

Dave tries his luck with the BB gun

The poor beer can copped a beating

A pretty accurate shot!

It was me of course ... or not??

Dave - the birthday boy

Dave shoots Dave with the BB gun - he asked for it!!

Saturday night was made complete with an open fire, pavlova birthday cake, and my first ever s'mores for dessert! (s'more:  a traditional nighttime campfire treat popular in the United States and Canada, consisting of a roasted marshmallow and a layer of chocolate sandwiched between two pieces of graham cracker). Liz was amazed at how excited one person could be - she clearly does not understand my love of chocolate and/or other sweet treats!

Delicious pavlova cake

Pavlova cake cutting FAIL

Campfire!

Taking cool campfire photos with the fancy camera

S'mores!!

Sunday was a little more depressing as we all realised we'd soon have to make the five hour journey back to Vancouver. The sombre mood in the car spoke volumes of the wonderful weekend we had enjoyed and was briefly interrupted as we made our way through Whistler on the way home and thoughts of our upcoming Christmas festivities started to creep in. We had a sneak peak of our accommodation and I have to say I am pretty excited!

We're preparing for a fairly quiet weekend in the lead up to our next big trip - Cancun! Steve's training is coming along well and I hope to have a nice summer wardrobe sorted out soon ...

Until next time...

Sunset at English Bay

Long Weekend Fun & Festivities

What a weekend! I honestly feel like today is a hangover day, minus the traditional pre-hangover day events. Let's call it my Grouse Grind hangover day ... and I'll get to that in a minute! Earlier in the week I made the comment that long weekends mean so much more when you're employed, and it's extremely handy for us that there's pretty much one long weekend per month in BC. How convenient that the first of August happens to be 'British Columbia Day'! Originally we'd contemplated going up to Whistler but trying to get bus tickets or a cheap rental car at short notice ended up being more trouble than it was worth so we decided we'd stay in Vancouver for the weekend and attack the list once again.

Saturday morning started with a well deserved (or not?) sleep in. We'd both been fighting off cold symptoms from earlier in the week so a sleep in was in order. It was such a beautiful day outside we decided we'd head to the local West End markets for a coffee fix (for Steve) and a brownie fix (for me). Yes, it was delicious. So delicious in fact, I forgot to take a photo before devouring the entire thing (but not without some resistance to Steven's attempts to have a bite).

Comox Street Markets - our local

Markets embracing Pride Weekend!

Later in the morning we headed off to have lunch at Horseshoe Bay. What a gorgeous little place! Horseshoe Bay is one of the two areas where the ferries transfer from Vancouver to Nanaimo (Vancouver Island) and back (the other being Richmond, where we caught our ferry to Victoria). We spent the afternoon walking around and admiring the million dollar houses, picnic-ing and making the most of the sunshine. I also forgot to mention that this weekend marked the start of Pride Weekend in Vancouver. I took great delight in collecting evidence of Steven embracing Pride Week to its full potential ...

An example of the impressive houses at Horseshoe Bay

Horseshoe Bay - pretty scenic!

A perfect day for a picnic in the park!

Steve embraces Pride weekend ...

Nanaimo Ferry coming in to the Bay.

Enjoying the sunshine!

Saturday night we made our way to English Bay to watch the first of three fireworks shows - part of Vancouver's annual 'Celebration of Light' which involves a fireworks competition between three countries - Canada, Spain and China, who was first up on the agenda. The firework shows take place over the course of a week, with Spain presenting their show on Wednesday night and Canada rounding out the competition on Saturday, August 6th. China's show was pretty spectacular. I generally find fireworks to be fairly underwhelming so I was pleasantly surprised.

I'm sensing a Pride theme here Steven ...

Fireworks!

More fireworks!

Sunday morning began much the same as Saturday morning. I had all the best intentions to get up early but it didn't really work out that way. Fortunately Steve took one for the team and did his long run (25k) for the weekend so I decided it was only fitting to reward his hard efforts with a trek to Grouse Mountain and our first attempt at the infamous Grouse Grind! To set the scene, we'd finally got ourselves sorted and ready to head off, I'd done the necessary public transport research (or so I thought - hah!) and we began our walk to West Georgia Street (approx 5 minutes) to catch the bus. Little did we know what awaited us just around the corner ...

Batman ... say it isn't so?

Yes, that's right - a whole lotta Lady Gaga!! I seriously couldn't get 'Born This Way' out of my head for the rest of the day. So our grand trekking plans were momentarily foiled by Vancouver's Pride Parade - which turned out to be pretty fun in itself.

West Jet float.

That's not dangerous ...

... at all!!

Some great signs to be seen!

Once we'd made our way through the crowd of people we hopped on the 240. So numbers aren't my strong point and I guess counting bus stops isn't either, because we ended up hopping off at the wrong stop - I'd made us to North Van but not quite where we needed to be to catch the 236 ... it also didn't help that we needed to get off at "Ridgewood" ... but we got off at "Bridgeman" - honestly, Ridgewood and Bridgeman sound very similiar!! (okay, so add hearing to my list of weaknesses back there). Thankfully we asked some nice bus drivers a few questions and made our way to Grouse Mountain in the end. Our first time in the 'burbs since we'd arrived and I can't tell you how gorgeous the houses are in North Van. I wish I'd taken some photos!

So our primary purpose for making the trip to Grouse Mountain was of course to take on the infamous Grouse Grind. Basically the Grouse Grind is a 2.9km trail up the face of Grouse Mountain and consists of 2,830 stairs and an 853 metre elevation. It was a humbling experience to say the least! In fact, when my cousin told me he'd run the Grind when he was in Vancouver I was thinking, oh yeah, well, if he could run it then I'll be fine walking it ... I thought I was going to die. Several times. I even had to use both hands and feet to get myself up some parts of the trail it was so steep. I'm sure Steve thoroughly enjoyed it after his 25 km morning run too. People do run it though, and the fastest recorded time is 21 minutes. Insanity. What's more is that in the midst of the suffering and pain I saw my first wild bear!! I couldn't believe it I was so excited. What makes it slightly scary is that the bear actually ran only metres behind and past us to cross the trail and I didn't even notice until I heard a guy from down below yell out "bear on the right" ... so I turned around after a 30 second brain-compute delay (owing to lack of oxygen I can only assume) and I saw the baby brown bear running down the mountain. Crazy! And so cool!

The very beginning - provides a nice false sense of security!

Views as we make our way up the mountain!

Looking back down the trail

Winners! Well, finishers, anyway!

Once we'd completed the Grind and taken a few photos as evidence, we decided to make the most of our suffering and enjoy the rest of the day up on the mountain. We visited the resident orphan Grizzly Bears Grinder and Coola and Grey Wolves (retired from the movie industry!), took the chair lifts up to The Eye of the Wind (wind turbine) and decided to finish off the day with drinks and dinner at the Altitude Bistro which overlooks Downtown Vancouver - a pretty spectacular finish to an incredible day!

View from the top!

View of Downtown (where we live!)

Grizzlys!!

Wolves

Chair lift up to the wind turbine

Grizzly playing in the water

Views from the chairlift

Now we're off to complete the weekend with dinner at Guu (a great little local Japanese restaurant)!

Stay tuned for more adventures! :-)