April’s Northern Escape

I am in Victoria now, on Vancouver Island, staying in a charming 1908 Craftsman bungalow that is like a miniature version of my Berkeley house (back of house and kitchen pictured below).  John and I brought our e-bikes up here with us, pulled behind my old Prius on our fancy Kuat bike rack.  On previous visits, I’d heard about the Galloping Goose trail but I’d never ridden it so I’ve been excited about doing so. Similar to the rail trail in Vernon, they took a… Read More »Galloping Goose

It really is something to be in Canada reading about the early volleys of what is likely to be a hair-raising election season with Trump already embarked on a violent, authoritarian strategy with his militia in Portland and now Seattle.  Along with his statement that he isn’t willing to say he’ll accept the results of the November election, it’s not hard to imagine where this might be headed.  In today’s Globe and Mail, which I read every morning in paper form, there is an OpEd… Read More »Plants, Not People

Our quarantine is over so we are out and about. However, despite how well BC has been doing around COVID, there was an outbreak of 35 infections in Kelowna (30 miles South of us) due to young folk partying in hotel rooms so it is creeping closer. Yesterday, we took our e-bikes to a winery in Lake Country, just South of Vernon, and then rode about 30 minutes to another, had a tasting, and then rode back to the car and drove down to the… Read More »Lakes, Vines, and Wine

We’re living in strange times, eh?  Catch that Canadian accent?  When I tried to rent a house in Victoria for us to stay in for the month of August, I got the cold shoulder from several owners because they perceived that I was American by my phone number.  One even found me on Facebook and saw that I live in Berkeley.  Rules here are that only travel within the province is allowed so unless I could prove we were BC residents, folks did not want… Read More »In Quarantine

The last time I wrote a blog was back in 2012-2013 when I lived in Africa for 8 months, first in Tanzania and then in Zambia.  While British Columbia is a less exotic location to be writing from, the world as a whole is in much greater turmoil than it was back then.  And the U.S., in particular, is one of the countries struggling the most to contain the COVID19 pandemic and to deal with a range of other underlying problems that the pandemic and… Read More »Heading North