Expedition Canada

Beans Means Heinz Thu Oct 19th But which ones?  An excursion to our local supermarket the other day left me curious about the difference between the original Heinz Baked Beans sold in Canada and the British Style sold alongside.  After a bit of research it appears it is not limited to just to basic styles and the original baked beans in Canada may be different again to those sold in the USA.   One video I stumbled across Original v British Baked  beans suggested the British Style had less sugar. It went on to say that the British Style were different to the original beans sold in the UK. Commentators in the USA indicated their 'original beans' were darker, sweeter and had a more smoky flavour through the addition of pork.  By this stage I decided I'd bean dwelling on this far too long, and gave up! Turnstone In the last blog I posted a picture of what I thought was a Least Sandpiper.  My personal birding advisor (PBA), who I worked alongside ...

Fall has Arrived Wed Oct 4th Before heading off to Vancouver Island the Sunshine Coast Regional District, who supply our water, announced that the Coast had gone on to drought level 5 and implemented Stage 4 water restrictions effective Sept 8th.  No outdoor use at all and heavy fines for those breaching the rules.  Our water salvage tank which had  kept the veg beds watered  holds 800 gals and had run dry.  It had rained while we were away but the water restrictions remained in place.    The day we returned Chapman Lake was down to 0%.  The storm that came through over the weekend of Sept 23rd and 24th was sufficient for Chapman Lake to go from 0% to 100% within 3 days.  At 34 ha in size and holding 680m litres of water it was not insubstantial rainfall.  All water restrictions were lifted on Sept 27th and our water tank was again full.  Our last few days on Vancouver Island provided a further opportunity to watch the Orca from our...

Orca Alley Tue Sept 19th Local Orca passing through - they came back in the other direction the following morning After the departure of the mountain bike crowd, we had a week with Ros before she and the expensive mountain bike she won at Whistler's 2022 Crankworx, returned to NZ.  Crankworx Whistler is one of the World's leading mountain biking competitions and she was one of the volunteers working the event in 2022.   Did you know some mountain bikes now come with electronic gear change and seat height controls!  Quite why anybody would want to spend north of $15k (Ca) on a mountain bike that is going to be thrown down a hill is beyond me. The Wednesday before Ros went back out to NZ, we managed to get out for an afternoon's sail on one of the club boats with one of my sailing mates and his wife. We had a gentle potter up West Howe Sound towards Langdale in a light breeze.   It is a beautiful setting for a sail with the mountains on the Sunshine Coast, Ke...

Covid Sat Sep 2nd Fall has arrived with a bang.  Actually several of them as we had a thunderstorm overnight on August 28th that rumbled on from late evening on Vancouver Island before moving across the Salish Sea and echoing around the mountains and lighting up the Coast.   Not only did we enjoy a rather noisy thunderstorm (Jack was on our bed in seconds - a place he is usually denied access to), but it started a couple of forest fires on opposite sides of the Sechelt inlet.  One was extinguished reasonably quickly, the other is now under control .  The 29c Summer dropped to 19c Fall overnight and it has remained cool since.  Despite the rain, water use has now been restricted to Level 3 (Acute), further limiting the times for watering gardens, fruit and veg. By coincidence I stumbled across a video which talks about Canada having 20% of the world's fresh water and more lakes than the rest of the world.  I have not been able to validate the data, but...