Expedition Canada

Coast Art Crawl Tue Oct 25th Moody sunset over Vancouver Island Note from Ed: Production difficulties this last weekend have delayed publication of this blog. Our six month old grandson has been in town (with his mum and dad) and he is sooooo much fun, the blog went down the running order! Newly acquired 4' x 4' artwork This last weekend has been the annual Sunshine Coast Art Crawl .  Stretching the 80km from Langdale to Earls Cove, 169 artists have their work on display.  Painters, potters, sculptors, wood and metal artists, and more.  With a population of a little over 32,000 the Coast is quite a creative hub.  Musicians and performance groups are also in abundance.   There is some amazing talent here! We have been on the search for a large painting to go on the main wall at the top of our stairs. A local Gibsons artist, Teryl Mullock caught our eye and we visited his studio on Friday.  A former architect who designed his own house , (and greenhouse), he has replaced the dra

Thanksgiving in Tofino Tue Oct 11th Heading to Horseshoe Bay for the second ferry to Nanaimo You may have seen the videos of dogs on skateboards. Jack, being a fan of the water, decided to try surfing, albeit in the shallow surf.  Undeterred when knocked off into the water, he was straight back on. We spent the long Thanksgiving weekend in Tofino, the surfing capital of BC.  Two ferries and 200km made it a day’s travel to get there, and back.  Canada is big.   The route from Gibsons via the two ferries to Nanaimo, then across by road to Tofino There is no direct ferry from the Coast to Van Island. Van Island and the Coast are supplied and serviced from mainland BC, which acts as a hub, mainly because there is no commercial freight demand between the Coast and Van Island.   Personal travel is not sufficient to economically sustain a direct service, according to a BC Ferries crew member I spoke to.   So the 'hub and spoke' arrangement is an hour’s wait for a 40 minute crossing f

Still feels like Summer Mon Oct 3rd Sunset over Van Island - still warm enough to eat outside Message from the editor:  Technical glitches in the last blog update email, lost the formatting and didn’t save the changes after the typos were corrected.  Guardian readers may not have noticed.  The forecast rain reported in the last blog never arrived, water restrictions remain in place and the Sunshine Coast Regional District has convened their Emergency Committee.  Although it’s cooler at either end of the day, temperatures have been in the mid twenties which is 6c - 10c above average for this time of year.  The rain forecast set to swamp the Public Holiday next weekend  (Monday Oct 10th is Thanksgiving in Canada) is also looking less likely, maybe a few showers.  The coast has gone 80 days without any significant rainfall.   Some are speculating it may lose its status as a temperate rain forest. Canadian Thanksgiving is a celebration of the harvest (much like the US’s in Nov and UK’s Har