Still scruffy, but rested... and relaxed

I slept in this morning - the one gift jet-lag gives me, since I don't otherwise sleep in usually. A good night's sleep makes a bit of difference in my outlook. I think it comes down to what everyone knows about the Internet - be careful. If a cadre of quasi-stalkers put a site, its author, and even comment-posters under the microscope, I simply should not comment there.

As to posting my written travelogue, nah. For starters, I wrote it by hand. I really don't want to retype all of that. Secondly, it is mostly about other people, what happened at the wedding, the visit to my sister in law. I always try to be a little circumspect regarding writing down the lives of the people I know - after all, they haven't consented to being written about. Even with their names obscured, it would invade their privacy to say too much, so I won't.

But mostly the reason I can't post it is that every day is a new day. Reading it over, each day in the journal is not today. Whose outlook doesn't change, even slightly, day by day? I remember once finding a 5-1/4" floppy with a diary I'd written in 1984. While interesting in a "hmm, I don't remember that" kind of way, none of it seemed like anything I'd write - even the style was hard to recognize as mine. I suppose that would make me a poor writer, as rewriting older material is a lot of what you do. My poor Father spent about five times longer re-writing his book than he did initially writing it.

At any rate, I know I'm rambling. The trip? It was a wonderful visit. The wedding was very enjoyable, the weather for an outdoor wedding was perfect, and we enjoyed Comox's park immensely. Especially the Tea House, a quaint little outdoor cafe that is nestled at the base of the park and which is built with cedar timbers and thatching.

Then we went by float plane to visit my sister in law in the Broughton archipelago (a place chronicled in depth in the book "Bill Procter's Raincoast.") We stayed on her and her husband's boat and float in one of the area's marinas. Behind the marina are ancient pictographs painted by the Kwakiutl. While there we saw orcas, a young black bear, several eagles, porpoises, and not a few seals. My wife and daughter helped my sister in law with her craft work, and we met many very interesting people who carve myriad ways of living out of a place with no roads, no electricity, and no phones.

My brother in law took us out on excursions during the day, as my sister in law was working. Some of the stuff we did:

- hiking up an old logging road (not a car road, but a path used by a Steam Donkey.)
- Visiting a logging camp.
- Boating through the bays looking for three humpbacks that had been sighted
- Went to a potluck dinner with no less than five salmon dishes (the local inhabitants all catch them.)
- Met some survivalists who specialize in paleolithic tool making.
- Flew over Sointulla and an Alaskan cruise ship at low altitude.
- Met some quasi-famous people.
- Listened to a bag piper serenade the sunset on a floating barge.
- Saw a fish farm (an object of the locals' ire.)

I prefer the kind of vacation that takes you completely out of range of email, answering machines, the newspaper, but it is good to be back home now. I took a few good shots, and I'll try to get those posted. Of course, there was just no way to capture the full aura of the place - the filling solitude of a place with few people and bursting life. And I didn't capture the height of the mountains and cliffs. But what I did get, I'll post. :-)