I left my heart on.... Vancouver Island

Here are the pictures from our trip to Vancouver Island. Like I said, it was fantastic! (Still haven't found that thesaurus.) The trip was as wonderful as our honeymoon (stop your snickering!) and I think I've decided I like "winter" beaches more than "summer" beaches. We were visiting over their cooler months, but it never really gets hot. My kind of place. No sweating or sunburns! It is a temperate rain forest, so there is also a lot of rain, although in all our time there we only had one wet day (thanks, God!). Now all we have to figure out is how to take a trip like this every year, just the two of us, not every eight years!

Check out these tidal pools. You can see how vast the tidal difference was- about 12 feet every day.

I was joking that Erik was trying to kill me off on this trip to collect on my life insurance (kidding, kidding!) because he had planned on us taking a sea plane tour. I deplore little planes. And it didn't help that I had a movie in the back of my mind in which one crashes in the wilderness. However, I must admit it was probably one of my favorite parts of the trip. The pilot took us into the glaciers and then at the end we flew over the ocean and spotted three gray whales migrating! I will never forget that sight. I couldn't decide which pictures to post. They all were fantastic (there's that word again!).

Our pilot also said that he came here on vacation and never left. I had the same thoughts...

A 1500 year old tree (fuzzy picture- it was raining that day) that we saw on our kayaking trip to one of the inner islands. Think of all that this tree has seen!

An old open pit mine that was turned into a garden 50 years ago. I'm wondering if I could get my yard to look like this...

A sprinkle of pixie dust

Maybe I should be blogging about the fantastic trip that Erik and I took just the two of us at the end of May. Suffice it to say it was wonderful. Glorious. Magical. Did I say fantastic? Where's my thesaurus? Anyway, we had to drag ourselves home. Except that there was the draw of these two very cute kids waiting for us...

Here's the fairy, at her ballet recital last week:

In case you were wondering, yes, they were the cutest ones there!

If you are curious as to why they are all doing different things on stage, have you ever tried herding cats?

Luckily she didn't notice the giant crowd of people until towards the end! And like all good things in life, after all that time, effort and money, their performance was over just like that. Like, one minute and fifteen seconds. Um, can we get an encore?

Matthew thought his sister was the star of the show, clapping and screaming when she came out to perform. Only problem was he was trying to be the star from the audience. Needless to say the men left during intermission.