This Be Wine Country

Love at first sight. Unfortunately the luggage monkeys destroyed my huge tun of wine.  Well not really.  They were decorating a lawn (empty) but I couldn't help going up to one and hugging it in the glorious fall weather of Niagara-on-the-Lake.

Now for the context.  Geordie, Peter, Sharon and myself took a drive around Niagara-on-the-Lake wine country.  Lots of orchards, nuts, cheese and a winery or two or three or thirty.  The different colours of the grape vines are different species of grape for different wine types.

This is a peek into one of the operating wineries.  This one is an ecologically run one that utilizes solar energy and no chemicals.  Very nice.  It smelled really good in there too.  It had a scent of oak casks mostly.  It was a great day driving about lovely countryside.

Thanksgiving Guest

My cousin Carolyn was in visiting us for the Thanksgiving week-end.  One of the favorite things we like to do with our out of town visitors is take one of the little false creek ferries over to Granville Island for some browsing.  Its a good way to get a different perspective of the area and it has the possibility of spotting a harbour seal.  We were lucky as we had glorious fall weather the entire time.  And pumpkin spice lattes!

We also used the aquarium as an excuse to renew our memberships and visited that as well. We gently prodded various sea binkies, anemones and cucumbers.  We got splashed by a beluga whale too. It was good seeing my old friends Jack and Daisy. We also saw caimans, bats, sharks, otters and the South African Penguins which are a delightful new addition that Geordie and I will talk about more in a later post.

Carolyn and I are mature serious adults so we made a tacit tandem decision to put on the dolphin costumes in the kids area.  Here we are frolicking like the mature and serious adults we are.  We are quite the trend setters as when we were done others decided that we were on to a good thing on copied us.

Dinosaurs! New Ones and New Finds!

I am still 5. Geordie is too.  We love dinosaurs!  They are big!  So we went to the Royal BC Museum that had a great dinosaur exhibit. All about new discoveries.  You know its going to be good when a big Tyrannosaurus Rex skeleton greets you.

Psittacosaurus is this neat little fellow. Either that or I typed by sneeze.  He has the cutest cheek tusks.  They are a newer discovery.  See the little ones?  The display had great dioramas recreating a few different periods.  There is some amazing stuff coming out of China right now. These guys are believed to be a very early ancestor of triceratops even though the adult shown would be less than 2m long.

One of the newer discoveries is that dinosaurs may not have used some of their spikes, plates and bone for defense against predators or like the pachycephalosaur skull below to joust for females like mountain goats.  Instead of heat butts and defense it might be used to attract mates! Apparently the curvature of the bone would allow for only glances rather than crashing charges and the structure itself isn't built to withstand those sorts of impacts.

In conclusion, dinosaurs continue to surprise and kick ass in equal measure.

I got bugged at the Victoria Bug Zoo

On our Victoria Bucket list was the Victoria Bug Zoo.  This is a small zoo dedicated to bugs. But you likely guessed that. But unlike most zoos that don't let you pet the tigers, this one is different as that you can hold some of the large leggy creatures inside of it.  Below I am holding a leaf insect.

Geordie is holding some kind of demon bug from hell.  The creature alien from the first Men and Black movie was based on that creature.  And yes it is terrifying. I held it after this tiny blond girl was completely fearless like a boss.  I couldn't let myself be outdone by that.  Geordie was braver and is all getting into it.

One of the prettiest is this Mantis who specializes in hiding among the petals of a certain orchid.  It took forever to spot her. She is a graceful lovely thing just like the plant that is her home.