BM part one

So burning man....its defiantly a thing. We survived, in part because we had a huge RV, in part because we were paranoid/terrified and thus put in a lot of preparation, in part because it's not actually quite as bad as we imagined and a big part was because we had a fairly mild year. I mean it rained heavily on Monday morning.

This probably should be a what did we learn post, but I think I am going to save that for later. I am just going to stick up a few of my favorite pictures of us in a sort of before and after kind of thing. But really its more like early in the week and later in the week.

Before.

Pre-dinner mood, first day of traveling

Early!

Just parked at will-call

Earlyish...

Later...

and we got a few dust storms towards the end

Survived!

Briony standing by our address pole, the decorative sign post had been souvenired

After.

Oregon sand dunes, two days post BM.

Bang

In other news, More Fireworks! Got a couple that I am happy with. Turns out there is this thing called the Honda celebration of light where three international teams compete to put on the best fireworks display set to music. Each display goes for about 25 mins, one team per night. This year it was the USA, France and Japan competing (or rather companies from each of those nations) with Japan taking the prize.

So we saw a few types I'd not seen before, including love hearts from the French and some lovely waterfall like effects from the Japanese, none of which I managed to capture effectively :)

Destruction

So things have been a little busy here, We went out to dinner one night and came back to find our apartment full of firefighters. Seems one of our cats had managed to turn on a tap and the sink hadn't been able to keep up with the flow.

We now have a bit of a hole in our flooring, downstairs has some water damage. Briony is gearing up to argue diminished culpability due to sink malfunction and I am just dreading the bill.

...and we're back!

Online again.
I'm a bit unhappy with the quality of the photos I am getting at the moment, but a combination of guilt (lack of posting) and persuasion (Briony) has me putting this one up.
The view from our new apartment, pardon the sky/seam artifacts.


I have just learnt that you should take your panorama shots from left to right as the file numbering then works in your favor.

Life in General

So I think there are going to have to be a few text based posts :( Paul has given me an assignment that would be easy for me to relate by text or speech but I am having a bit of trouble capturing it with an image. So Paul, I'm working on it.

We've been getting a bit of riding in, had two rides with Briony on Mt Fromme, we found a fun little trail called Espresso that makes me think I can actually ride a bike, and I've been rapidly getting better at steep rocky switchbacks; 'cause its safer to ride them than walk them. I'm really not exaggerating...much. Weather permitting we are off to Whistler this weekend.
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/532728227
http://connect.garmin.com/activity/531396231   (As you can see by the heart rate, I. am. not. fit.)

Got a new boardgame, Terra Mystica, so much wood. It's a fun euro game that plays reasonably quickly with a nice amount of asymmetry and beautiful components. Not found anyone to play with yet, but we aren't being very social at the moment while we get set up.

Went paragliding the other day, had four flights, logged a little over two hours of flight time. Caught a few thermals, caught quite a bit of turbulence, went on an under-prepared cross country flight.

The XC was arranged while shuttling to the top with one of the tandem pilots, "Get high enough to fly over that little peak and you will be fine to make it on glide, aim for the roundest hill and follow Kevin into landing." Turns out the landing was here.

The landing

I thought it was somewhere here,

not the landing

The problem is that top down it is clear which hill is round and which is a ridge, in profile from launch the closer round hill appears quite conical and has a lot of vertical features while the ridge behind it appears to be a lovely round dome, so I was aiming at the wrong place.
And I came down here

my landing

I was a bit low and knew I wasn't going to make the ridge line and had to pick a landing, I would have preferred to land here

My flight path preferred landing

but from the air it looked like freshly sprouted crop field and I really didn't want to deal with landing in that and the resultant damage/farmer grief, so I scraped over some powerlines (I would guess I had 15-20m vertical clearance but I was still closer than I wanted to be) and landed crosswind, which I ran off for my best landing of the day. So a lack of updating my flight plan with my current situation and then sticking to it left me in a situation where I was forced to land now rather than choosing to land. So I would have made the landing if I'd headed in the right direction I was trying to get get to that southern ridgeline to get some lift. I flew too far north of the river bank and missed all the thermals/lift generated by the mudflats, I was flying in the water affected air. The thing to do is follow the river bank (right above it) and then make a line for this hill

the "roundest" hill

which apparently produces some real lift then land in the field in lovely laminar wind.

Views

View from the new apartment, not moved in yet (we haven't got our stuff yet), we went up to watch the Canada day fireworks....which I failed to adequately capture....turns out you actually have to focus the camera (actually I did focus it, then set it on manual and then zoomed in thus losing focus).

:-)

You know you've been living in Surry Hills for a while when the sight of hipsters relaxes you. Vancouver is lovely and the people are really nice, it's just taking a while to re-calibrate our perception of normality.* We went to Cirque du soleil and there was something relaxing about it,  then we spotted it Hipsters. I don't consider myself one (stinks of effort dude), but they become part of your life in Slurry.

A brief review: started strong with springy frogs, truly scary female acrobat on rings/ribbons, clowns great, interesting juggling act, strange carpet spinning women, when did circuses become sexy? Oh and set workers in costume and making scenery changes part of the act is great. Good sound and some rather special costumes.

*For instance we walked past a parking lot underneath an overpass behind the hockey stadium that had been filled with planter boxes and was growing lettuce and some rather bolted rocket.

Our current living arrangement!

Water view!

We can see the seabus ( a regular ferry service between the north shore and the city) scuttling across that expanse. Every now and then someone parks a great big ship in the middle of it.

While out of stair window,

A construction site! Which isn't as bad as it looks now that the demolition works has stopped shaking our whole building :)

Tacos

So we went to Whistler bike park on Sunday, there was a bit of rain about but lovely to be back on the bike and rapidly improving my riding. Lift assisted riding has left me hurting in completely different muscle group compared to riding the north shore. Briony was feeling a bit hungry so Rob (British Rob) made a taco.

Oh and Rainbows and scary big jumps

Coffee

No photo here, I am saving that for the time that I find one to my taste. The Vancouvians, is that the collective noun? Any way, the Vancovians and possibly the Canadians and perhaps north americans seem to take great delight in drowning their coffee in buckets of milk. It's a little weird, they seem to take great pains with the bean selection and the roasting, perhaps a little less with the brewing, but some places seem to take that very seriously as well. But when they have that espresso shot they then reach for a bucket, the normal size here is 12 fl oz or 345 ml, then they go for 16 oz and 20 oz. In contrast Australia typically serves a 220ml (8 oz) cup as the regular size.

I ordered a macchiato today and got a latte. I think it is time to cross over to Vancouver in search of somewhere that makes little coffees :)


Late edit: I just remembered drinking macchiatos in Italy and getting it wrong the first time. I mistakenly ordered a macchiato latte and got marked milk, perhaps that is what is happening here. Next time I am going to order the macchiato café and see what I get.

Those crazy Canucks

One item in what will be on going reportage of interestingly named or visually distinctive Canadian food products.

Vancouver Week One

Horribly over exposed. Time to got back to bracketing for this blog.

Tourist sights. We are trying to get as many in as possible before we realise we've lived here for two years and not been to X because only tourists go there. Above is a shot of the Lynn valley Canyon, which seems to kill a few people every year. Not just the bears to look out for then.