Oct 24, 2014

Left Sunshine Valley on Wednesday Oct 22 in the afternoon headed for Harrison Hot Springs to visit a child hood friend and his wife that I haven’t seen in many years. Their names are Frank and Liz. Frank lived in my home town of Goderich until around age 11 then headed West to Vancouver and Hope BC with his parents. About 10 years later just as my career was beginning, I traveled for business to Vancouver and reconnected with Frank. With my career just recently ended, 33 years later I have reconnected with Frank in person. We have “skyped” off and on over the past 8-10 years from India and Germany where he was living at the time, until returning to BC in 2009. To have a bond that goes back that far is I think quite special. We spent a couple of evenings camped in their front parking area and caught up on many years of activities that we both have been involved with discussing places travelled to, scuba diving, family, politics, economics, etc..

Yesterday’s weather wasn’t too great with rains continuing, but we did get out to a fish hatchery and over to Harrison River to watch a government fisheries crew at work. This time of year is “salmon run” so the mature adults come back to the hatchery were they born 4 years prior to spawn and unfortunately die. It’s amazing they find their way back. We spoke to a girl at the hatchery as we were leaving and they were going over to the river to find some adults that were ready to spawn, so we followed them….through native land that we weren’t supposed to go in but, oh well – no signs. When we got to the river there was about a dozen fisheries staff that had set up a net corral that had lots of sockeye and Chinook salmon in it that they were measuring, weighing, tagging and keeping some that were ready to spawn. Meanwhile other staff in boats near where finding dead salmon in pooled areas that had spawned. They speared them, removed the tags for information if they had tags and cut the fish in half.

There are SO many fish spawning………It was very interesting!

Today we took a nice walk around “Harrison” without the need of an umbrella and saw a lot of the village. Take a look at one of the pictures below at a tree called a Monkey Puzzle Tree. It was very unique and not uncommon in this end of the country.

As my heading says – BC!!! British Columbia truly is a beautiful province. We left our gracious hosts with a fond farewell and promised to not let another 33 years pass until we reunited. Thanks Frank and Liz for your hospitality!

Off to Vancouver. He had not planned to spend any time really in the city, but thanks to Frank’s tip to camp at Capilano RV resort right at the base of the Lions Gate bridge, we are simply on the other side of the bridge then you are in Stanley Park. Right downtown.

There will be more squawking about this over the next few days.