A Trip to Victoria for Work

In April I had the opportunity to take an overnight trip to Victoria for work. I'm on the board of directors for the Integrated Cadastral Information Society and we have our annual board meeting either in Victoria or in the lower mainland and this year was Victoria. I made my way over the night before since the meeting was first thing in the morning and it's not realistic to fly over first thing in the morning. This gave me a bit of time to do some touristy things in Victoria which included walking by the parliament buildings, exploring the bay and taking in the miniature museum. The highlight was a working scale model of a saw mill but Gulliver was a close second.

The meeting itself was uneventful except for when it was over and I had to walk back to my car. I had to circle the building a bit to find parking and ultimately didn't have a good reference of where I ended up. The only thing I could remember and happened to have evidence of was a seagull with a fish and chips tarter sauce container stuck on it's beak. I'm pretty sure it was at least temporarily stuck as he flew between buildings with it on. I never ultimately found the seagull again but I did manage to find my car after about an hour of searching. There were only so many car lots that it could be in. 

On my way out of town I wandered through Victoria's Chinatown. Having recently also been in Vancouver's version of Chinatown there is a significant difference. Victoria's is smaller but it's remained livable and there were several restaurants and shops that would be good places to regularly visit. I'm assuming it's not just Chinese residents anymore but it's nice that the historical elements have survived and are being preserved. Hopefully Vancouver is able to do the same. 

 

Easter

Ordinarily we go to Oliver each year for Easter but this year we had just gone to the island for a celebration of life and there was a lot going on with everyone's school so we decided we would stick around the house. Kerry made turkey and we had the traditional easter dinner but just with the family. The highlight was Kerry put on her new Easter Bunny costume. She had purchased one for her previous school and decided her new school needed the same. When purchased off of Amazon they are quite economical and the kids love seeing the Easter Bunny. She always has good stories about the kids that feel they know it's her. She doesn't have a voice when she is the Easter Bunny so they have no real way of knowing. This was Oliver's first interaction with the Easter Bunny and he was not exactly thrilled.
 

A Trip to UBC

After two years of hard work, Carter and his best friend Jeevin have successfully made it into UBC. I do not think I would have made it into UBC if I had tried. The requirements for UBC engineering are in the mid to high 90's over the course of grade 11 and 12 and Carter managed to do that in virtually all of his courses. He will be heading there in September so we decided we would head down for a visit of the campus and pick up a shirt and see where his residence may be. The commute from our house would have been 100 minutes each way so it doesn't make sense to commute.

I'm not exaggerating when I say that the UBC campus is likely one of the best looking campus' in North America. It's on a peninsula on the ocean and is surrounded by forests, mountains and ocean. The residence that he will likely get is not very old and everything is walking distance. If he wants to venture 'into town' it's just a bus ride away. It will be a big change not having Carter in the house during the school semesters but I know he's looking forward to it and this will be a very memorable part of his life. Congratulations Carter!

Visit from Uncle Andre

I don't know why but despite this being a fairly important event i don't seem to have any pictures. I'm hoping there might be some on Kerry's phone so if I remember I will come back and add some. I have another post about how I learned about my long lost uncle so I won't bore you with that story but the exiting part was that he was coming to Canada to visit for the first time. We had already met him in Amsterdam and we met up again at my Uncle Bob's celebration of life and as part of that trip to Victoria he was going to meet us in Surrey.

His plan was to go to Prince George and he was hoping for a local train but this is North America so that's not really an option. He ended up flying up for a few days where he saw my Grandmother's house, visited his Father's grave and checked out our lake property. It was April so not a great time to visit Prince George but they still managed to get down to the lake front.

Him and is wife arrived in Vancouver on Tuesday and I picked them up from the airport after work. We came home where Kerry had a nice dinner waiting for us.

The next day I had to work but I still had a plan to keep them entertained. In between meetings I took them to the Skytrain where they could see North America does have some ability to get around by rail and they went o Waterfront station in Vancouver. This allowed them to finally make it in to Vancouver since the airport is Richmond and we live in Surrey. They had a good time taking in the waterfront and then I picked them up and we checked out Whiterock Beach.

Perhaps the reason I didn't get pictures was because we had such good conversation. We talked for hours into the evening and I took them back to the airport the next day. I think they are glad they managed to get a visit in and they enjoyed their Canadian experience.