Christmas in Courtenay

My parents bought a townhouse in Courtenay on Vancouver Island in 2024 and this was our second family Christmas out there. For those of you that have never been to the Island, its a stunning mountainous landscape and in winter there's constantly steam and fog rising out from the forests.

There's only about 45 minutes of daylight where its not raining, but if you can be outside in that window its an excellent opportunity for a hike and some gorgeous landscapes.

Neighbouring Comox as an air force museum and, continuing the theme from our last post, they have an annual contest among the units on the base to see who can decorate the preserved aircraft outside in the best way. There were no wrong answers, but this plane with antlers and a red nose was certainly a strong contender for my vote. Kathryn has also really mastered night photography on her phone and got some incredible flares and streaks to bring some extra energy to this picture.

Of course the real Christmas Miracle was Wesley being the centre of attention and getting all the love he so richly deserves. He remains a pretty nervous traveller so bringing him there takes some effort but once he arrived he took right to it, clearly remembering the layout and the different people from his extended stay last year.

Seasonal Lights

Winter in Vancouver is long, dark, and rainy, so we are very grateful to the artists and creators that bring unexpected light and colour to our soggy grey-blue city every year.

Lumiere is a great example of precisely this sort of effort, with an 11-year track record of lighting events around downtown Vancouver. We have enjoyed them ever year and its been fun seeing it expand from a few lit up animals in our neighbourhood to a festival like we get now. This year they had an experience that included laser beams and lights on the trees also lighting up dry ice smoke being pumped through the air. The raindrops were similarly picked up by the light, making for a very cool experience.

While experiences are all well and good, we were very relieved to find some of our old favourites again this winter after an over-long hiatus. Although we miss having them in our area, we found Davie, Barclay, Luna, and Stanley scattered around downtown as well as this delightful squirrel (that you would be forgiven for mistaking for a fox)

At the top of our list of unexpected surprises was this dragon. Better still, there were enthusiastic people on hand saying "Would you like to ride the dragon and make it breathe fire?" Its design included a tractor seat beside a lever that would open and close the mouth and emit an audible belch of fire.

Other highlights for the evening were fire dancers, opera singers, bubble blowers, and a general sense that the city had come out of hibernation for a few hours. Not so bad for a dark winter night, and at least we don't have to shovel rain...

FWOOSH!!

So what'd I miss?

That was a pretty wild ride wasn't it? If you lived in the same reality as me then you endured the same global pandemic, lock downs, travel restrictions, and general buzzkill that made us all quit trying to anything. Remember when all the buildings in your downtown were boarded shut and you couldn't sit next to your wife on transit? Not really adventure material I am afraid...

Another reason I have been slow to get back into this groove was a 3-year stint at a local tech company. It began as an incredibly rewarding and engaging place to work, but after we were acquired it turned into a capitalist nightmare. There were a ton of great people being run by a few monsters I'd rather not sacrifice further mental bandwidth to and both working there and then spiritually recovering afterwards required some downtime on my part.

 

So that was a little bit of a hiatus, but I'm going to make a sincere effort to reboot this little blog back into a twice-weekly log of our adventures and travels again. We shoot a ton of photos in beautiful and interesting places but only a fraction of a fraction of them are ever put into books, and those are typically hyper-focused to just the very best 10 per trip.

Like the above - that is a wonderful picture of us both that I will never find a better use for....