SUMMER METAMORPHOSIS

And now, for something completely different. We’ll be caravanning across Canada this summer.

Granville the dog, OrangePekoe the cat, and us travelling in our 6.5 metre caravan. Camping spots are booked in national and provincial parks across the country. There are a couple of exceptions, of course, because sometimes we will stop to visit family and friends, and we are hopeful that some family and friends will find us at our camping spots along the way.

We leave on July 1st, Canada Day. It’s a classic Canadian road trip, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, eight provinces in about as many weeks, a bit rushed but still.... And with a complete change at the far end of the trip.

I’ll post snapshots from along the way - on Facebook, and on a Blog.

What brought about this trip?  We had planned to caravan west across Canada, taking a couple of summers to complete the trip (no fun caravanning during a Canadian winter).  This summer we'd planned to travel just about half way across the country.  Then next summer we'd continue to the west coast.  It has all been truncated to happen this summer.

Why?

Sometimes life throws us a sweet curveball.  

At the end of April I signed a contract for an interesting job in British Columbia. It'll mean a couple of years in Wuikinuxv, a village in a remote part of the BC Central Coast area, north of Port Hardy but south of Bella Bella.  It's a fly-in community, with a supply barge every couple or three weeks, depending on weather.  

We were flown out for a recce, and both of us loved the environment (an iconic Canadian landscape of mountains rising straight out of the water). We enjoyed the people we met, and the job is just enough of a challenge to be fun, but not so much as to be daunting.  

Nigel plans to fish a lot, and generally putter around. That's pretty much what he does now; well here he plays golf.

So - changes are happening.  Change is good.  Both of us like to see what's over the horizon, and experience new places. We'll have it right here in our own country. Perfect!

SPRING FLOWERS

This has been a damp spring. The flora are enjoying their long, tall drink.  Here is a small sampling of what is readily visible up our road this week:

Our second magnolia tree is blooming.  I have no details about this tree except it was a much appreciated gift from colleagues when I left the school where I had worked for several years.  

It has gorgeous, fairly large, yellow flowers that shyly bloom after the more flamboyant magnolia has finished showing off. 

We have a couple of these shrubs in the yard. Both were purchased at end-of-season sales. The label has long since disappeared, and because I am generally haphazard with garden records, I have no idea what it is.  I love the small, pink blossoms, and the purple leaves.  
It might well be a sand cherry, but who's to say. At the end of the day, it's all about giving beauty and pleasure.

A few years ago, Nigel stuck a stick in the ground to hold some string at the edge of one of the vegetable gardens. That stick decided to grow. To our delight, it is now a small apple tree, with those beautiful flowers on display at this time of year. 

One of my favourite spring-time sights is the carpet of blue forget-me-nots sprinkled with bright yellow dandelions found along the road verge.  This is such a cheerful colour combination that a viewer can only smile with pleasure.

Of course, dandelions are not always welcome spring flowers, because they seem to take over the more usual, ornamental gardens. However, apparently they help nourish bees when there is little else available for them. If you like the bitter taste of the leaves, dandelions help nourish us as well. 

And finally one of the iconic spring flowers in the Maritimes - lilac shrubs make a beautiful display with their mauve flowers complementing the green foliage.

The white lilacs are pretty, but somehow not the visible flower that we see on the mauve variety.

Very suddenly, the soft, gentle splashes of nature's palette will disappear as spring turns into summer. The road will be green, and the colours will be concentrated in the few garden beds in the yards. It will be beautiful, but in a green monochrome, restful for the eyes, and requiring long, lazy days to enjoy the subtle variations in the landscape.  That's next season.