Borders Open

Snowbirds Flock South

Mon Nov 8th

Mt Elphinstone

Mount Elphinstone just up behind us is now dusted with snow, Whistler Village and the Sea to Sky Highway also has a covering and the main slopes are close to skiable.  Winter beckons, as do the ski slopes.  Grouse Mountain on the North shore of Vancouver, which has a well known hill climb beneath the gondola, is shut because of too much snow.

With snow arriving here, Canadians preferring the warmer climes (termed 'Snowbirds') like the southern United States are heading south with the land border opening today.  It has been possible to fly into the US, but not drive until today.  Dedicated snowbirds have flown south and had their RV's delivered.  Long queues formed at the border ready to escape the winter weather.  Some of us of course, can't wait for the snow to enable Whistler to open up later in the month.

Blackberry Gin

With the glut of blackberries this summer we have made Blackberry Gin, which we decanted out today.  It tastes pretty good and should go down well at Christmas.  There is still about 5kg of frozen blackberries in the freezer, so more jam and some blackberry and apple pie are on the horizon.

We now have to decide what to do with the berries from the gin mix.  A boozy ice cream is the most likely solution.

An email arrived over the weekend,  from a chap congratulating me on my election victory  and reminding me he'd met me when we went Halibut fishing (which I've never done) with some other chap.  I was invited to consider the presentations from a Covid 19 anti-vacs conference in Alaska.  I had to reply saying I'd never been Halibut fishing but would like to try it, nor been to Alaska, which is on the bucket list and not been elected to the legislature in Alaska, unlike my namesake Mike Cronk (R).  Given my namesake's politics I can understand why he thought I might be interested in his anti-vacs material.  I resisted the temptation to share my full view of his presentation.

Sea to sky highway mountains

A pal who works for AP in Washington DC had alerted me to Mike Cronk's election victory in Alaska about nine  months ago.   

There is also a Mike Cronk, who works for a big broadcast electronics manufacturer called Grass Valley.  A few years ago I prearranged a meeting with him at the major broadcast electronics convention in Las Vegas.  When I turned up on the stand for the meeting and the receptionist asked who I was, I think they thought I was taking the piss!

Closer to home, we have got to know one of our neighbours over the last few weeks.  He migrated to Canada from West Germany in 1957, having previously fled from the East.  He is now 93, still quite sprightly and fairly with it.  He pitched up today with a book he'd promised to loan Fred, about a town called Husum, in Schleswig-Holstein (Nord Friesland, north of Hamburg near the Danish border) where Fred had stayed in during her au-pair stint in Germany and which is a town he loved and had fond memories of.  He came in for a cuppa and we got talking.....  

It was a fascinating to hear his story of schooldays in nazi Germany, living and working on the family's farm in what became East Germany after the war.  How it was confiscated by the communists and how he fled to the West after completing his degree in agricultural biology.  Arrested and imprisoned while trying to get in to the west, he went on to complete a masters in Bonn.  He then moved from an agricultural research centre in Germany to the Univeristy of Saskatchewan, where he specialized in cereals research.  He never married and he no longer has any family, but despite the early hardships, the  horror of Nazi Germany, a bout of Hep B caught from German POWs returning from Siberia, he remains stoic.  After the horrors he has seen 'he has nothing to complain about'.   Mindful this is Remembrance Day this week it was a poignant chat.

We have had some high tides lately and many of the logs that have been sitting on Hopkins Landing Beach have been washed back into the sea.  This morning the shoreline was thick with floating logs.