Canada Day '09 - West Side Adventure

I woke up just before 10. It was Wednesday, Canada Day 09, and I was supposed to be rendezvous-ing with Ed and Sheree at the junction of Woods Road and Mt. Gardiner road in twenty minutes. It wasn't going to happen, that spot being a 2 hour hike from my house. So I called them and opted for the fossil fuel resuce plan.

Thanks to encroaching old fart-ism, I was still bent out of shape from the festivities on Monday night, when my army-bound friend Odin and I went and saw Sonny Rollins at the Orpheum. Thinking we were in for a proper schooling in old skool jazz sax, we were sorely disappointed to witness stumbling and bumbling of a past great whose best-before date had clearly lapsed. We stayed for two "songs" and split. Without going into the teenage details, I got home the next day by 1 in the afternoon, and began the recovery process, which mostly involved snoozing in the hammock.

So there's the state of mind that I was in as Ed and Sherree and I, my dog Vera, and their dog Chester, headed into the bush for the one hour trek to Barb and Jaquie's hike-or-boat-access-only cabin on the remote west side of Bowen Island, an 8 km stretch of the island whose foreshore is denied conventional access by steep cliffs hundreds of feet high.

It was hot and steamy inland, but the cool damp forest air kept us from breaking a sweat. After losing track of Chester thanks to itinerant deer a couple of times, we emerged from the bush at
Barb and Jaquie's, a beautifully renovated two level post-and-beam cliff-hugging cabin looking west towards Keats Island and the Langdale ferry terminal on the Sunshine Coast.

Beer and Caesar's were the beverages du jour, and we assumed our positions among the Cape Cod chairs with B&J's neighbours Tom and Carroll (and their dog Tessa, B&J's dogs Maggie and Molly completing the canine crew). After big fat burgers were graciously served by Barb and Jaquie, sticks were procured to entertain the fur-bearing friends and we migrated to Tom and Carrol's warf (photo above) as B&J's is under renovation.

These photos below are of the aquatic dog action.