Work is insanely busy right now, so I’m having a hard time getting to updates from the Netherlands trip. We’ve also had some fun days here in Vancouver, so I thought I’d do a quick and easy update from the last trip to Galiano and recent photos from Vancouver - we had another amazing Northern Lights display!

Vancouver - It’s Been a Beautiful Fall

This fall has been really nice - the leaves changed early and generally it’s been sunny and clear. I had to take a few photos of the view of the city from the rook the other night.

It was a pretty nice sunrise!

Quick Weekend Trip to Galiano

With all the work trips and with Justine now needing to go to the office more regularly, we’re struggling to get over to Galiano as often or as long as we’d like. This past weekend we headed over Friday night, staying through Monday. With the fall progressing, we have a lot of end-of-year clean up that needed to be done. Plus we had a wood shed to try and finish.

We got the wood shed mostly finished. We still need to sort out what we're doing with a door (if at all) and need a facing board on the front and back. But that's pretty minor. It should serve the need.

Most of Saturday was spent putting the roof on - I do not really enjoy doing shingles.

The next step will be to stack all the wood we have laying about. We'll get to that next time.

My fancy new kindling making. I tried it out - it works well!

It's mushroom season! Our lawn is covered in them right now. And we've had the best year for finding edible ones in the forest.

I got out golfing. These ones were on the golf course - I just missed these ones at their peak. The big one was the size of a small plate.

Justine found this very cool spider on one of the posts in the orchard. His body was pretty big - between a nickel and a quarter in size. I've not seen one like this before.

Northern Lights!

With this year being a solar maximum, we’ve been fortunate to have some great Northern Lights displays. We had one night on Galiano that was amazing. Thursday night they were projecting another good one. I was playing hockey Thursday night, so after the game and after our drinks at the bar, I drove out to Spanish Banks West of downtown to see if there was anything going on. It was close to 1:00 a.m. and the parking lots were packed! So that was a good sign.

I parked the truck and sat on a log on the beach and watched the show! In some ways it wasn’t as good as the nigh on Galiano. It was not as “whole sky”, but this one the Northern Lights were more visible with the naked eye. You could see the colours, and I watched them change and flow for about 15 minutes before I had to call it and head for home. I had a 6:30 a.m. call, so as much as I would have liked to watch for longer, I needed to get to bed.