lesser wildlife

Back in Victoria and avoiding weeding by blogging…

Looking at my last post, it needs a bit of fleshing out and clarification. First off, “the lower mainland” really means greater Vancouver and covers a tiny fraction of the southwest corner of British Columbia. Victoria, on Vancouver Island, is the provincial capital and thinks itself pretty special, and the phrase may have begun as a bit of nose-thumbing at those uppity Vancouverites. It’s a theory! Vancouver is internationally famous for its city planning – it’s called Vancouverism. The philosophy goes along the lines of making it as difficult as possible to get from A to B in the faint hope that travellers will use some other means of transport than their cars. That isn’t actually the philosophy but is the way it appears to those of us who just want to get across and out of town.Second, I should have mentioned the guide company we used in the Fairmont area, BC Rockies Adventures, in case you are ever in the area: great people and very knowledgeable about the area
I'm still waiting to see an adult male Big Horn Sheep, so far only young bucks moulting

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There are a lot of hot pools in BC and in the East Kootenays in particular. Some are natural like Lussier and some like Fairmont and Radium (about 50kms up the road and a National Park) look like overgrown swimming pools.

Waiting for Jim to get out of the pool, his appetite for it being much larger than mine.

It got a bit chilly toward the end of our stay so we decamped a day early (our ‘camp’ was a fully equipped one bedroom suite with swimming pools, golf course, and tennis courts attached) to
Kelowna to drink some wine and break up the drive which would have been 11-12 hours from Fairmont to the ferry.
Our friend, Hotwire, came up with a great deal at the Holiday Inn Express in Kelowna which turned out to be a really nice place to stay and included a full breakfast. We’ve had good luck with both Hotwire and Priceline for hotels & car rentals. We had dinner at Quail’s Gate, (don’t show up without a reservation and do expect it to be pricey!) and of course bought some wine while there.

 








The patio at Quail's Gate on a damp June day and my painted version of a windy August evening.

As always when we’ve been driving in the hinterland of BC it is a shock to get back into the traffic of “the lower Mainland”. The vast majority of the provincial population lives within a 60 kilometre circle. But we only had to wait an hour for a ferry which was a bonus.

And this morning, sitting on its favourite perch outside our kitchen window, we were greeted by our resident red-tailed hawk.