Hanmer Springs in South Island, New Zealand

Ken is having 'bike envy"!  Our first real trip without a motorcycle and even though we are having a great time we can't help but think this trip would be fantastic on a motorbike.  New Zealand has loads of twisty roads and fantastic scenery but also a lot of wet weather and traveling in Deep Purple is very comfortable and dry.

Ken stops to admire a couple of KTM 990's and a Husky 650(with a 32 L tank)that just came off some dirt...he misses it!

A New Trip

Today we are off to New Zealand for three months and then on to Australia for around 7 months.  A trip without a motorcycle so we decided to start a new blog with a new theme...gassmansgoneunder.blogspot.ca.  We can't wait to get started and we hope to hear from you

along the way!

Pincushion Mountian

Check out the view from Pincushion Mt. on the Youtube link below;

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwyF9wKLNOk 

The map at the trailhead on Beach Ave, makes it look so easy.  

Once at the top the sun was shining and we our brow was glistening!

A Canadian flag marks the top of the climb and a great view.  A picnic table has been brought to the top thanks to the chefs at Okanagan paragliders and the chefs at The Gaushus restaurant.

Yes, if you look really hard you can see the flag!

Boucherie Mountian

Boucherie Mountian, if you live in Westbank you are used to looking at it, driving around in or even partially over it as you wind your way to one of our many wineries or on your way to Kelowna.  As things sometimes happen, I have hiked many places in the the world but not some right at my back door, Boucherie is a prime example of that.  So...on this return trip home I have taken the time to hike to the top several times and what a nice hike it is. Though not that long of a distance, the assent and decent can be quite steep but the reward at the top is magnificent...a 360 degree view of the Okanagan Lake from Okanagan Landing to Peachland.  Though these pictures may be somewhat duplicate, I felt the need to include all of them.  

The view north, up Okanagan Lake with Kelowna and the Okanagan bridge in the background.

Who's the "King of the Castle"?  Ken still loves to climb to the top of any rock pile he can find, like a billy goat!

The first time up Boucherie was on Thanksgiving weekend, in preparation for a big Thanksgiving dinner.  Share used an App on her phone to measure the elevation gain and distance of our hike.

 200 metres up and 4.5 km. long.

The second time up the mountian, I took my little sister, Sharon.  Along the way we stopped to read a few of the wishes left by other hikers on the 'wish tree'.

Some people also left stones placed around the tree making wishes for a better and healthier life for themselves and their loved ones.

The leaves and grassed are turning to lovely fall colours that are a nice contrast to the blue of the sky and the water.  And way off in the distance (you just can't quite see it in this picture) Little White Mountians is already capped with snow.

Sharon and I had to pose for a pic in front of Kelowna and the bridge so we could remember this beautiful afternoon.  But while I was setting up the camera for our picture....

There is this!!!  She just couldn't help herself...I guess there is a little aphrodite in all of us ;)  

What fun!!!

September at Home

I feel like I'm on vacation...from vacation!  A few less blogs.  With most of the time we have spent at home, here in B.C., visiting family and friends and revisiting areas of our province that we know and love, we are relaxed and settling into a easy routine.  Just a few camping trips and bike trips...we are happy with that.  Through the pictures that follow, hopefully you can see why we love it here in B.C. and are always happy to come home. 

Camping a Little Big Bar Lake in the Cariboo.  So much more room to pack camping gear when you have two bikes.

And as the sun sets over Little Big Bar Lake we reflect on some of the reasons we love Canada.

Dog Creek road runs along the Fraser River Canyon and through the Gang Ranch, one of our favorite rides.

What a great campsite.  After a day of riding it was great to sit the relax at La Salle Lake just outside McBride.  Just a bit of the Rocky Mountians can be seen in the background, what a reflection!

It just takes some fresh ingredients and a love of good food to make salsa...

and that is what Mom and I did.  Spicy salsa, peach salsa and black bean and corn salsa, all made with fresh vegies from my parents garden.

Don't let the look on his face say anything...he loves mowing the lawn...really!

Mount Baker looms in the background behind the City of Vancouver.  We lucked-out and had some fantastic weather on our trip to the coast, Vancouver and Bowen Island.

Ken and his sister Shari toast to good times with family and friends on her rooftop patio.  It was a great meal and a nice evening for Mexican.

The totem poles in Stanley Park in Vancouver, a must see when you are in the city for your first time and many times after.

Wow, thanks again Tony for a feast not to be soon forgotten.  Prawns and crab, right out of his traps...you just don't get fresher than that!

"The Chicken Coop" on Bowen Island. The 4 chickens do their part producing eggs but they are just part of the family and wait patiently to be let out in the morning to have the run of the garden during the day.  Real FREE RANGE.

While on Bowen Island we walked the path around Killarney Lake every day, 6 km. that are not hard to take.

Now that was an big, old tree...oh the stories it could tell.

We made a quick stop in Mission to visit Sue and Rob, this girl is a fantastic cook and healthy too.  For breakfast fruit and vegie smoothies accompanied our meal.  Good stuff!

A steady brisk breeze is hard to come by on the Okanagan Lake but we got out for a great afternoon sail with Ron, on his 26' McGregor.  We didn't want to come in.

Long english cukes from my parents garden, we are loving it!

Across the Okanagan Lake, Kelowna gets a bit of a rain storm and Westbank enjoys the rainbow.

We are so lucky to be in the Okanagan during the fall.  It is grape harvest time at the wineries and the weather is great for a few last motorbike rides.

At Home in Westbank

,

Back in Canada we are busy enjoying friends and family and doing the things that we love to do here at home, which remind us why we love Canada.  Our house continues to be rented so the first two weeks in Westbank we spent a Ken's parents place, taking over their spare room, and then moved on to my parents house where we moved into my old bedroom in the basement.  When will the kids really leave home???

As always we can't be without our wheels (2 down on the rubber kind) so we purchased a beautiful white Suzuki 650 for Ken and a racey (ha, ha) red KLR 650 for me (on which Ken cut down the seat and adjusted the front forks so I can just barely touch flat foot), I love it.  We also decided to buy a van to camp in for the rest of the summer and fall.  We found a solid, rust free, '92 1 tonn Chevy-van in Osooyos with lots of room to throw our mattress on the floor in the back along with a propane cook-stove and lantern, and all the rest of the camping stuff.  We have been back for just over 5 weeks now and we have made it out camping once and are getting quite a bit of use out of our bikes.  With still two months left in Canada before we plan on leaving again we have time for several bike trips and camp weekends, there is always something and somewhere to see around here.

A nice day for a ride!  On the way to Chris and Kim's wedding in Kamloops we stopped to enjoy the view at Trapp Lake along Hyw 5a.

Dad does the bbqing, tasty artisian pizzas...can't wait for dinner!

Ken loves anything with a motor and  back at the Ficke farm he tries his hand at driving the 

John Deere AO. (You have to love my mom's geraniums too!)

Who are these masked men?  Ken and Tony take a ride up into bush around Westbank.  Ken was lucky Tony had an extra Honda CRF450X dirtbike for him to use...he realy missed the riding.

We have some great cooks for friends.  Brian and Sandy invited us down for a Dutch Oven chicken dinner, complete with roasted potatoes, carrots, parsnips and squash.

The sunset on the treetops at Windy Lake (and that was about all the sun we saw on our 4 day camping trip).

A Waterskidder (is that their real name?) sitting on top of the water...looking and waiting for what?

A nice afternoon for a paddle around Windy Lake.  Ken caught a couple of fish and made it in to shore before the rain began again.

At last, the fire ban was lifted and we were able to have a campfire and warm up a little.  The first night out went down to 3 degrees...brrrr.

A nice afternoon and a 275 km roundtrip from Westbank, up behind Peachland and over to Princeton via the Osprey Lake Fst Road then back thru Hedley, up the hill to the Nickel Plate mine and over to Apex and Green Lake road.  Checkout the switchbacks up the hill in the background behind Thomas, Scott and Ken.

"What are you looking at?"  A black bear enjoyed eating something in the bush that was lip-smacking good...

and just steps away from the bridges and latters at Hardy Falls in Peachland.  We took our Czech friends (that we met on Tioman Island, Malasyia) to see the spawning Kokanee, what bonus when they also got to see their first bear!

A major transformation occurs when the Kokanee return to Deep Creek every year to spawn. The beautiful red colour lasts only for the short time before they are beat up and eventually die as they make their way upstream.

The Maritimes and Atlantic Canada

                                                                

                                                                Back in Canada!

                                                            Halifax Farmers Market.

                      Peggy's Cove, one of thr most photographed places in the Maritimes.

Lobster traps line every dock, at all times of the day.

Lobster Lane, I love it!

A great hike along the beach at Harbour Rocks, at Cape Joli Head, Nova Scotia.  The water was so clear, maybe a little cold to us western wimps but very blue and clear!

Yes, it is rocky!

Smoking some little Kippers.

Digby Scallops and Fish and Chips, we love em!

Lobster boys mark traps in season and the walls of sheds in the off season.

In the Bay of Fundy the tide the difference in high and low tide can be up to 12.5 metres and over 1/3 of the bay floor is exposed at low tide, it is one of the largest in the world.

Cape Split on the northwest side of Nova Scotia does exactly that...split.  Off in the distance you can just make out the shores of New Brunswick.

To get an idea, Ken is standing beside a bank lined with seaweed that would be underwater at high tide.

Alma Lobster Shop is the place to go for great lobster.  You can buy them cooked, they will make them ready to eat by breaking up the shell for you (they will even supply butter and picks).  Ours was not this big (7 kgs)!  We wish!

Pictures perfect small towns in PEI.

Ken gets a taste of farming.

We had some on the most amazing camping spots, this one is at Cape Meat off the Cabot Trail in Nova Scotia.

What a great summer job portraying the folks that lived 400 years ago in Fort Louis-burg.

 

Not all days were sunshine.

Monte Gros Morne in the rear.  We hiked the 16 km and 806 mt. in just under 6 hours, return.

There is great hiking in Newfoundland, Rob took us to this viewpoint located just outside Cornerbrook.

Did I mention we loved the lobster?  We tried it in Nova Scotia, PEI and Newfoundland.

The puffins at Ellison possed for us in front of their burrow/nest.  They are a way too cool looking bird.

Gannets nest on the rocky cliffs of St. Mary's bay. Beautiful and so very elegant.

 

Along the way as we hiked around Signal Hill we stopped for a photo with Fort Amherst in the background.

Mailboxs depict the colourful rowhouses in Halifax.

Westjet flew us home a beautiful sunny day.  Even if we couldn't drive home across Canada we got to see a lot of it from the air.

After a great tour in Europe, S.E. Asia and Iceland we decided it was time to come home to Canada.   Heinz sold our trusty Honda Africa Twin in Germany and we came to Canada with plans to buy a couple of bikes or maybe a van in which we could camp our way home across Canada.  Neither one happened as we were not able to buy, register and insure any type of vehicle(except new)without a permanent address, the only thing we could get would be a transfer permit that allowed us to travel from point A in Nova Scotia to point B in Westbank...directly...that wouldn't do!  Sooo.  What to do?  Rent a car...let someone else worry about all that stuff, so that is what we did, a different way to go for us but it turned out great.  Using our camping equipment from the bike and buying a few odds and ends like a cooler and some extra pillows, blankets and cooking supplies we hit the road for a 5 week tour of the Maritime provinces.  In Nova Scotia, New Bruswick, and P.E.I. we drove a Chevy Cruz and in Newfoundland in a Toyota Corolla, we would have stayed with the Cruz but the company we rented with wouldn't let us take it to Newfoundland so we traded it in and Enterprise gave us a way too good a deal on the Corolla, they even let us pick up the car in Halifax and drop it off a St. John's, Newfoundland with only a $125 drop-off fee(unheard of according to a couple of other rental car agencies)!  We purchased a cheap flight, St.John's to Kelowna, which left 5 weeks after arriving back in Canada...and so the new saga begins.

Only 7 1/2 hours after saying good-bye to our dear friends in Germany we landed in Halifax with a detailed description in hand of how to get to our soon to be friends and fellow couch surfer's place in the heart of the city.  Ray and Chantel opened their house and lives to us for 3 days, they were great hosts and made us feel totally at home.   So as discribed above we started out to explore Nova Scotia and shortly realized it was kind of nice travelling with a car, mainly...room for a cooler to keep a few groceries and room for a few luxuries like jeans and sweaters for the cooler weather (something you just can't do on a motobike) these we found at yard sales as we went along.  The yard sales were fun in themselves as we got to meet a few locals along the way, let's make a deal.  It was also nice to be able to have campfires at night, we bought some cool fire logs to carry with us, made from compressed shavings.  We visited the usual tourist spots in Nova Scotia; Peggies Cove, Digby (for their famous scallops...yum, yum), Luninburg with the Blue Nose 2 and the Bay of Fundy, not to mention many provincial parks.  We slipped into New Bruswick as we ventured to the north of Nova Scotia and spent 2 days visiting The Flowerpot Rocks and trying a little of the lobster in Alma before leaving the rain behind us (New Brunswick was the only place we had to get a motel due to bad weather) and moving on to P.E.I.

We totally circumnavigated P.E.I. visiting places like Summerside, The North Cape, Cavendish, East Point, Georgletown and Charlottetown.  Of course we had to try a few P.E.I. potatoes, tasted the salt air blowing off the shore, went to a local theatre production and ate lobster dinner in the basement of St. Anne's church.  We arrived across the Confederation Bridge and we left the same way five days later.

Just under three weeks down and we returned to Halifax to exchange our Cruz and pick up the Corolla that we would take to finish up touring the northeast of Nova Scotia and continue on to Newfoundland.  After the switch of cars, a quick stop to say hi to Ray and Chantel (our couchsurfing friends) and to stock up on a few groceries at Costco, we were off again.  The last part of our tour in Nova Scotia was the Cabot Trail in Cape Breton, we had been looking forward to this because we had heard so much about it from other tourists.  Once again, we were just a little disappointed and thought the trail didn't quite stack up to all our expectations...maybe we have seen too many beautiful areas that we tend to compare other places to?  I don't know.  Anyway...let's talk about the roads.  OMG, we found most of the roads in the Maritimes horrible, I really hate to say it but it is true...we were glad to be driving a rent a car!

We took the ferry from North Sydney, Nova Scotia to Port aux Basques, Newfoundland, and in about 6 hours and $200 later we were in 'love at first sight"!   Coming from Iceland we found a similarity between the two even though Newfoundland is located mainly below the 50th parallel and Iceland above the 60th.  Apart from the lava fields in Iceland, they both had short stubby trees, lots of wind, and a type of boggy tundraish vegetation.   Even though we had been worned about all the moose and having to be very careful driving the highways we only saw one moose on our whole trip and that was in Gros Morne National Park and at a long distance!  Cornerbrook was our first stop.  Rob, a friend from Mission, B.C., was at home in Newfoundland visiting his mom and invited us to stay with them.  What a treat!  Rob was able to give us the low down on the area, taking us on several hikes and also to a local theatre consisting of traditional songs and stories about the area.  And...his mom made us a lobster dinner!  You really have to love it!  On leaving Cornerbrook Rob came with us to Gros Morne N.P. where we hiked Gros Morne mountian, 806 m., oh what a view!  That night it was off to Rocky Habour and another show which I can honestly say rivalled any Irish Rovers show from back in the day!  If you are there you MUST go.  Leaving the east coast of NFL behind Ken and I set out on a mission to find icebergs and puffins.  In Twillingate, iceberg alley, we were informed that it was not a good year for the bergs and we wouldn't be seeing any locally...crap!  We missed seeing puffins in Iceland and we refused be skunked again, off we went from Twillingate to  Elliston and the Puffin Festival.  Yes, we saw puffins and from there we travelled south to Cape St. May's where the fog parted for us and we were captivated by the gannets, nesting on the cliffs.  Finally, we arrived in St. John's in time to visit Signal Hill and walk the famous George St.

We dropped off our rental car a couple hours before our plane left and once again the people at the rental desk couldn't believe what a great deal we got from Enterprise in Halifax...knowone is ever allowed to rent a car in Nova Scotia and drive it to NFL.  All we could do was smile, for once, just our luck!  The plane ride was a quick 3 1/2 hours to Toronto then 4 1/2 hours to Kelowna, read a little, a couple of drinks and a snack...and Bob's your uncle...home again!