First Couple of Days with Mojo

The first couple of days settling Mojo in have gone really well. He generally seems quite content and is a really quick learner. We appear to have pretty much got the hang of house-training and he's learnt where the pantry door is (and his food is kept!).

Here are a few pictures taken over the last two days :

He is reminding David which pocket the treats are kept in

Playing in the garden with some twigs, need to find some better sticks than these


David waiting for Mojo to 'toilet'. Mojo waiting for..........David.

We have been lucky with good weather this week, so we have enjoyed some garden time


Playing fetch with pine cones


However, he's still young and half an hour or so of intense playing knocks a boy out !

Mojo Joins our Family

Losing Charlie left such a big hole in our life we knew we needed to find a new member to join our family and we think we have found it in Mojo.

He is a nearly 9 week old Blue Merle Australian Shepherd that we picked up yesterday from a town near Seattle.


Of course as with Charlie we are bound to take far to many pictures and video of Mojo so here is just the start.
Mojo seems pretty confident and is happy here on his first evening to begin to play "fetch".


There will be more!!

And now beautiful weather

Just five days after having a few cms of snow we're enjoying temperatures of 18 and 19 and beautiful sunny skies.

This weather has enticed us out into the garden and getting outside jobs completed so not many exciting things to report this week.

Not An April Fool......

Looks like Mother Nature isn't quite done with winter just yet, even though April is now upon us, this photo of the garden taken this morning.

New Jay Brannan Video

So my Fave singer/songwriter has asked us all to share his new Video release with all our Blog readers.

An awsome track from an amazing album.




Thanks Jay.
x

Rice Lake

After being couped-up in the house for several days we decided today to take an easy walk out to Rice Lake. I hadn't been well over the weekend so didn't want anything too strenuous but were keen to get some fresh air and some sunshine.

Rice Lake is situated about 20mins walk from the top of Lynn Valley Road. It's easy to access, relatively flat walking and not being a large lake is only about an hour or so to walk around. We had not been there previously as it is situated in the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve, the large part of which does not allow dogs on the trails.

Snap of a snowy peak on the way down Dempsey Road.

We decided to lengthen the walk slightly by parking in Lynn Headwaters and connecting through to the Rice Lake trail from there and returning in a big loop along the Varley Trail. We weren't clock watching but I think the whole walk still took under 2 hours.
The road into Lynn Headwaters

We have lost the snow on the ground at home now but there's still plenty in Lynn Headwaters.

We parked the car at Lynn Headwaters, walked through the picnic area and across river, turning right to then follow the river bed south. We then reached the entrance to the Lower Seymour Conservation Reserve (LSCR).

The LSCR is actually huge, about 18,000 hectares which is almost 450,000 acres or 70 square miles. However only about one third is open to the public with the remainder protected environmental areas.
This map shows the public area of the park. The yellow dot in the lower left-hand side represents where we are stood taking the photo, you can see Rice Lake to the right of this. We will walk south-west along the Lynn Headwaters Connector marked in red and then up and around the lake. You can see that this is just scratching the surface of this huge park, with many miles of hiking trails.

Reaching the lake we discover that despite being 9 degrees and sunny it is still completely frozen and snow covered !

Another view across the lake

This is very much part of BC's coastal rainforest

Although the lake was snow covered the trails were mostly clear

This is a view looking up the start of the Seymour Valley Trailway, which is a 11km fully paved trail leading through the valley, roughly parallel with the Seymour River. Being paved it is obviously very easy to hike, but also allows access for wheelchair users, bikes, rollerbladers etc. What more quintessentially BC afternoon than rollerblading through rugged backcountry.....no doubt with a non-fat latte in one hand !

Here are a few more views of Rice Lake as we walked around it



Dappled sunlight through the trees

Finally a view looking the full length up the lake, before heading back down to the Varley Trail towards the parking lot.

Blimpie

If what they say is true, that 'you are what you eat' then the guys who named this sandwich chain when they established it in 1964 must be kicking themselves by now.

Orlando

The second week of our holiday in Florida was spent in Orlando. We stayed in a villa where Adrians sister and her husband flew over from the UK to join us.

We were there primarily to catch up and visit the theme parks which aren't particularly camera friendly so we kept this week to one post.

David did the lions-share of the driving from Florida City, around Miami and up Floridas Turnpike towards Orlando.

The first hour or so of driving was simply getting out of the Miami metro area. After that the road opened up and, well, kind of looked like this for a couple of hours.

This is Spring Creek Drive where our villa was located. On a small subdivision within the town of Kissimmee, a few miles south of Orlando.

Our base for the next week.

Inside was spacious and comfortable. Even though the villa was probably only 10 years or so old, it felt like it was stuck in the 1980's with it's decor and style.....I think it was a Florida thing. Pastels never left......

It had a private (and thankfully heated this time of year) pool. The screen around the pool is called a lanai and all homes in Florida have them to keep the bugs away in the summer time.

David having breakfast on the patio

Us in front of the Universal sign. We visited Islands of Adventure (twice), Universal Studios, Busch Gardens in Tampa and of course some outlet malls.

View over Islands of Adventure

This is a video of the Hulk ride at Islands of Adventure

By the afternoon it was warm enough to brave the wet rides.....

This is a still photo of us on the Jurassic River Adventure ride. Andy was wearing a ballcap at the beginning of this ride......infact look three rows up/behind him in this photo and you can see his ballcap disappearing !

Finally the log flume ride

Resulted in us getting absolutely soaked......


Thankfully, Orlando is a lot warmer than parks we are used to in the UK, even in February.
Finally, a photo of Karen & Andy in Universal Studios.

The Everglades

We stayed at a motel in Florida City for our visit to The Everglades. Florida City is just a big truckstop, strip malls, motels and burger joints but it is cheap and convenient for the national park.

We had a full day to explore the Everglades. There are two entrances into the park, the southern entrance and the northern Shark Valley entrance. We decided to head to Shark Valley as we had read good things about that side of the park and the possibility of seeing wildlife.

We hired bikes at the park entrance and cycled down into the park using the established trail system. There is in fact a 15 mile loop you can ride, but the sun was hot and the wind strong so we didn't go that far !

The views around this side of the park were perhaps less interesting than we had imagined. It reminded us of The Fens in the UK. Flat, bush with streams & ponds. The only difference is that there's more sun in the Everglades and less alligators in The Fens.

There were quite a lot of birds in the park, including a number of these tall birds - possibly storks of some variety ?


As you can hear on this clip it was very breezy in the park when we were there.

Then there were alligators. Lots of them. In the words of the Park Ranger 'don't ride over their tails, they're not speed bumps'. He kind of had to give that advice as they were literally lying on the trails, banks and in and out of the ponds and streams. Mostly they were very lethargic as it was winter and they are coldblooded so they don't do alot apart from bask in the sun that there was.

Them there is big teeth




We also saw a 'nest' (if that's the right term ?) of baby alligators. Tempting as it was to pick one up we happily resisted - we knew mum wouldn't be far away