Through My Lens: Golden Maple on Lost Lagoon
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a photo of our fall colours. And so, here’s one that I took a couple of weeks ago.
My West End
Last August, I had my cat-sitters over one evening for a picnic dinner to thank them for watching over my fur babies while I was away in Alberta. As soon as they arrived, we gathered up the dinner and some beach blankets and headed to the end of my street.
The end of my street is a grassy, treed spot between two beaches, never crowded but with a perfect view of the sunset. As a backyard, it’s great — even though I share it with the entire neighbourhood. At one point during the evening, I looked around at the dozens of people enjoying their own picnics, and marvelled at how much I love where I live, and that, even after living here for a quarter of a century, I have yet to tire of it.
Yup, you read that right. Twenty-five years ago today, I moved into my first apartment in the West End. And as long as I’ve been writing and posting on this blog, I’ve been sharing photos and stories about my home. It’s why I called the blog There and Back Again.
Because I always come back.
In honour of this momentous anniversary, here are some of my favourite, previously unposted, photos of my West End.
Through My Lens: English Bay Paddlers
When you live by English Bay, you never know what you’ll see on the water. Thanks to the power of my camera’s zoom lens, I was able to get this shot early yesterday morning.
Coulees Along the Crowsnest
I was in Alberta last month to visit family, and one evening I took a bus from Calgary to Lethbridge — a journey I haven’t made in a very long time. I took this photo of the coulees as we drove along the Crowsnest Highway. I just love this landscape.
The coulees are ravines that formed when the glaciers retreated after the last Ice Age. Wind and water gave them their characteristic V-shape. They are everywhere in southern Alberta, but are especially prevalent along the Oldman River that flows through the middle of Lethbridge.
Coulee evolved from the French-Canadian word coulée, which in turn evolved from the French word couler, which means “to flow.”
Salish Eagle
My latest BC Ferry ride — and my third of the summer — was on this boat, the Salish Eagle, which took me to and from Galiano Island just over a month ago.
Three of these Salish-Class vessels came into service in 2017 and a fourth one last year. Built in Gdańsk, Poland, they are the first ships in BC Ferries’ fleet to run on liquefied natural gas, thereby reducing their emissions. Compact compared to the bigger boats that sail between Vancouver and Vancouver Island, the Salish-Class vessels go to and from the Southern Gulf Islands and between the Sunshine Coast and Vancouver Island. They carry up to 600 passengers and crew and 138 cars, and I absolutely love sailing on them.
Each Salish-Class vessel has original Coast Salish artwork adorning its interiors and exteriors. John Marston of the Stz’uminus First Nation is the one who designed the artwork you see on the Salish Eagle.
Little Qualicum Falls
There’s a gem of a campground on Vancouver Island I’ve been going to since forever. It’s called Little Qualicum Falls, and a family weekend there at the beginning of June was my second BC ferry trip of the summer.
Qualicum, or Quallchum, means “where the dog salmon run.” Dog salmon (also known as chum) is one of the five major species of the BC salmon fishery.
We lucked out with absolute picture-perfect weather for our Qualicum weekend, which we were all incredibly grateful for. A year ago, we were in the thick of a more typical Juneuary and our plans to go to Qualicum were scuttled before we even got into the car.
The provincial park sits alongside the Little Qualicum River and around Cameron Lake. It’s a great family campground with lots of trails to explore, lots of swimming holes to jump into, and then, of course, there are the falls.
As we often do, we took a quick side trip to Cathedral Grove on our last day before turning around to head to the ferry. Driving along Highway 4, we noticed a helicopter with a heli-bucket scooping water up from Cameron Lake. We rounded a bend in the road, and then we saw it — the wildfire on top of one of the mountains along the highway.
It was a small one, but it grew, as wildfires do, and a day or two later, that same highway we had driven on was closed for two weeks, completely shutting off the coastal communities of western Vancouver Island from the rest of the province. A detour over logging roads was put in place, but it was a rough route and not recommended for tourist traffic.
The highway reopened once the wildfire was no longer burning, but assessments of the mountain slopes above the highway have deemed them unstable. And so, beginning Monday, Highway 4 will be closed for most of the day between 9 and 5 to allow crews to do rock scaling above the highway. They figure the work will take at least a month, which is really going to mess up the tourist season for Tofino and Ucluelet.
I’m glad we got our Island weekend, but I feel for all those whose summer plans are being thwarted by a wildfire that has long been put out.
Through My Lens: Sidney by the Sea
Summer has only just started and already I’ve had a number of ferry rides.
My first was a quick hop over to Sidney to have lunch with a friend. Sidney is located on the Saanich Peninsula of Vancouver Island and is considered a suburb of Victoria. It has a lovely waterfront you can stroll along (see above photo), a handful of touristy-type shops (that all seemed to close early), and quite a few places to have lunch (all of which were very busy despite it being a weekday). It took us three tries before we found a place that didn’t have a half-hour wait, although I suspect the wait might have been more about staffing shortages than about there being no empty tables.
It doesn’t feel like summer, to me, until I’ve been on a BC ferry. The trip from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay takes you through Active Pass, one of the most stunning places on the planet, in my opinion. I could not stop gushing about how beautiful my morning’s ferry ride had been to our server at the pub where my friend and I had lunch. She gave me such an odd look that I realized either I need to get out more, or she has never lived anywhere else and still takes her surroundings for granted.
I sure don’t.
Dishing: Paul
After the upheaval of the past few years, I am still marvelling at what a treat it is to be able to meet up with friends in restaurants again. Such a little thing, really. And yet such a big thing.
And so it was that I found myself on Robson Street for a lunch date yesterday. Paul is as ubiquitous in Paris as Starbucks is in Vancouver and I was thrilled when I heard that a location of this longtime French institution was coming to my home city.
Paul in the Jardin des Tuileries
The bakery and café’s Vancouver location — the only one in all of Canada — has been open since 2021, but yesterday was my first visit (because, you know, pandemic).
Paul on Robson Street
You have to suspend disbelief to think you are in Paris, though. Although my crêpe aux champignons et aux épinards (mushroom and spinach crepe) was excellent, the size of the pastries we perused in the display case on our way out were supersized, not small and delicate the way they are in French bakeries. And the seating area was light and airy with tables quite far apart, not squished together as they are in Parisian cafés.
But the service was very Canadian and it was a wonderful way to while away a couple of hours with a friend. I will be back.
Coronation Day
Many years ago, I toured the Tower of London with my parents and my siblings. Included in our tour was a viewing of the Crown Jewels. I remember entering a room that seemed (to me, anyways) something like a vault. I think we might even have been underground. The room was cold and quite dark, but that was so the jewels would shine. And shine they did, lit in such a way that they dazzled and shimmered. Each piece was on its own small platform covered in purple cloth, all at various heights, and all contained in one large display case. It was quite a thing to see.
I bought myself a souvenir booklet —The Crown Jewels and Coronation Ritual — which I still have. It’s worn and dog-eared because I studied that book from cover to cover.
Thanks to my viewing of the Crown Jewels all those years ago, and my souvenir booklet, I had a pretty good idea of the regalia that would be used in today’s coronation service. What I didn’t know, and what I was most curious about, was how the service would flow. It was the mix of civic and religious rites that was a mystery to me, as much as the beliefs involved are my own. The only thing I have to compare it to is a church wedding, of which I’ve been to many. But a coronation? I have no point of reference.
What I saw on my tiny TV early this morning (no, I didn’t watch it live — I recorded it on my PVR and started watching it when I woke up) was nothing like I have ever seen before. I had heard that King Charles wanted a more modern coronation, but everything I saw seem steeped in centuries of tradition.
So when the historical commentator on the CBC’s broadcast summed up what he had seen as “weird, wonderful, and wild,” I nodded in agreement. It was weird. Weird in that the ceremony seems spectacularly out of touch with our modern world. But it is also spectacularly wonderful in that a thousands-year-old tradition is still being practised. And wild in that so many of us can still find meaning in it, even as we declare ourselves citizens of a modern world.
Did you know the Dutch don’t crown their sovereigns? Apparently this is because when they regained their independence in 1815 (in the aftermath of the Napoleonic Wars), the Kingdom of the Netherlands included what is modern-day Belgium. The Dutch were Protestant and the Belgians were Catholic, so rather than fight over which religious leader would crown the king, they just skipped that part. In fact, most of the European monarchies don’t bother with coronations.
There may well come a day when the United Kingdom does away with theirs, especially as the idea of a state church becomes more and more antiquated in a world where freedom of religion is considered a human right. But I suspect the ritual will stick around for another British king or two.
The photo at the top of this post is of the towers of Westminster Abbey peeking out from behind Victoria Tower, which is part of the Palace of Westminster where the Houses of Parliament reside. I chose this photo because, well, first of all, I don’t have one of the Crown Jewels, but secondly, because it shows both church and state, the meeting of which was what today’s coronation was all about.
And thirdly, it shows continuity. The English kings and queens have been crowned at Westminster Abbey since 1066. Victoria Tower used to be known as the King’s Tower, but was renamed in 1897 to honour Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee — just as the Clock Tower (where Big Ben resides) was renamed the Elizabeth Tower in 2012 to honour Queen Elizabeth’s Diamond Jubilee.
That’s a whole lot of heritage in one photo.
There and Back Again 