Super, Natural British Columbia!

Yet again suffering from Post-Traumatic-Visa-Syndrome for the second time in two years, I did finally get my visa this year, just in the nick of time to actually start the planting season on time. Yay! So tomorrow, super ridiculously early, I'm headed out to Prince George to plant another 100,000 trees! (Wow, it sounds like hard work when you put it like that...) .

As with any planting season, we have a broad outline of plans right now, but they're to be taken with a pinch of salt since they will change! Provisionally though, after meeting in Prince George, we are breaking with tradition and heading south for a couple of weeks in Quesnel. This is just as well right now, cos PG is currently freezing cold and the blocks there still covered in snow... Quesnel on the other hand is due to be 20*c on arrival :D After a couple of weeks there, we're headed back Prince George way for a bush camp somewhere thereabouts (in bush camp, no news is good news as always!) and then, finally, we're headed back to Chetwynd, where we spent much of last season. All in all, should be a good summer! *fingers crossed*


In other news, if you go down to the post, "Ottawa, coldest capital..." I finally got around to putting in the picture of the Ottawa River and parliament buildings completely frozen cover, compared to the summer shot that was already up :D I'm also going to add a post of Winterlude pictures that i missed first time. 

So we're gone to the sugarbush, eh?

How does maple syrup with pancakes sound?

Following in a long line of Canadians past, last weekend saw my rite of passage into the world of maple-syrup-eating peoples. Admittedly a little late in the season, we headed out of Ottawa in search of a sugarbush - the hallowed ground where Canada milks (taps) her maple trees for sweet sweet nectar. (Well, except that as it turns out, maple trees don't give you sweet nectar, but more about that later).

I'd tap that!

We drove to Fulton's Sugarbush, 30 minutes from Ottawa near the actually rather pretty village of Pakenham. First stop, breakfast. the question is, pancakes, or pancakes? So i had pancakes, and maple beans, and then drowned them both in the on-tap maple syrup. Mmm. Like i said, maple syrup with a side of pancakes.

At the Mapleope Crossing... 

Now buzzing we went off to explore the woods, which is what the term sugarbush kind of really refers to. Traditionally the maple was tapped into buckets which were then hauled all the way back to the camp to be boiled.

Voila...

Ok, so that's mainly frozen, dodgy-looking water, but you get the idea...

Then somebody was let loose with plastic piping and they wired up the forest like a giant cats cradle, or perhaps a limbo world championships.

Anyways, it's kind of cool - you can see the little blobs of future-maple-syrup blobbing their way down the maple tubes.

Eventually all of the maple makes it back to the camp and it poured into huuuuge vats where they boil it and boil it and boil it, and then maple thieves create a national crisis when they steal it - http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-19440465 - who knew that one keeps "strategic" maple syrup ("The federation also keeps nearly 13m litres in syrup in three warehouses to stabilise global supply and prices.")... huh. Or, they don't steal it and I eat it.

The end.

Winterlude

When it gets really cold and dark in Ottawa, the city holds a festival to cheer people up. I seem to have forgotten about this when i wrote my account of Ottawa over the winter, perhaps because I hadn't uploaded the photos at the time. Winterlude's main attraction, apart from skating on the canal, is the ice sculpture competition that goes on ,with artists arriving both locally and internationally to compete. Our photos were taken on Neil's phone, so they're not the best, and it's a small selection, but it gives you some idea of how awesome they were. There was also a polar bear on stilts. Cool.