We've traveled all over the world, finding exotic landscapes wherever we go. Sometimes, though, it's easy to overlook the beauty close to home.
Here are some of the lovely sights we found when visiting ...
To say summer in Canada is a big thing is definitely an understatement. After months and months of cold weather, the average Canadian emerges in late Spring with a vigor unlike anything they've felt in the past eight months. There's a strange electricity in the air as everyone gets ready for a few great months of weather before the inevitable cold returns. As such, the majority of us tend to cram as many fair weather activities into our summers as humanly possible.
With that in mind we head to the prairies and cottage lake country where I find not only a healthy dose of back to nature enjoyment but also a reminder of the way I spent my youth...
We were told this would be the most amazing salmon run in 100 years, but nothing prepared us for the incredible sight of British Columbia's Adams River teeming with thousands of crimson red Sockeye salmon thrashing and heaving their way upstream. Millions of salmon return to their spawning beds in the Adams River each year. Fighting their way from the Pacific ocean, the salmon swim 400 kms (250 miles) upstream, all to lay their eggs and die in the river they hatched from four years before. After all this, only one of 4,000 eggs lives to be an adult. Those that survive make their way to the Pacific, where they live until they repeat the cycle and return to the river four years later. It's not fully understood how the salmon navigate back to their river of birth. The photos are from the salmon run in 2010, which saw over 100 million salmon. This was the single largest salmon run of this century, dwarfing ...
This winter we decided to make it a work season. We usually enjoy celebrating Canada's coldest season simply by not being here. Hockey lovers, skiers, snowboarders, snowmobilers, cross country skiing lovers and all those other winter pastime people are pretty much crazy in our minds. Sure, if you're stuck here anyway you should make the most of it and provided the weather is nice all of those can be quite enjoyable. We however, would much rather be just about anywhere else during the season of snowstorms, windchill warning days and "the greyness" as we like to call it.
Since we were trapped here for the winter and Micki's contract was scheduled until May we decided that a short warm vacation was in order. We never knew how much of an adventure we'd have before we even got on the plane though...