A Holiday In Canada's 11th Province

Wrapping a vacation in Canada's 11th province - Vancouver Island.

Began with a couple nights in Victoria, my second favourite Canadian city. St. John's is number one.

Victoria is not the little hippie city I fell in love with nearly four decades ago. The hippies are gone, replaced by the real estate prospects we know as fucking tourists. So many fucking tourists I wondered how the hotels held them all. Turns out the hotels could not hold them all if they tried. This we learned in a long conversation in one of my favourite old bars with a long time City resident who bought his place decades ago and has witnessed the incomparable corruption real estate developers in our allegedly post industrial economy are now very well known for.

"Nothing but air b'n'bs for fucking miles around. And every time a new condo tower gets built the suites are offered to local residents for a day before they get snapped up by motherfucking corporations as revenue streams. God damn parasites! Don't have any neighbours left in my building. New people every day. It is like sharing my building with Martians."

All those Martians are great for business however. All the shops were full of customers - even in a summer of forest fire smoke like this one which has scared more than a few folks away.

From Victoria we headed a little up Island for some quiet time in Moo Cow Bay, a little sea side village which has everything Sonja and I need for a little down time: cute hotel with a fine restaurant, a pub, a gourmet restaurant and a few shops, including an incomparably good bakery.

One of the shops is a gallery where we met the artist Roy Vickers after we recognized he was the guy sitting quietly in the back after we saw his picture on the wall as we admired his knock out paintings on the walls. He told us the story of the bent cedar box he built from a long buried deadfall western red cedar he dug up to work with. I have never coveted anything I cannot afford like I coveted that box. $25,000 for those of you who would like to support a fine artist who have taken better advantage of Capitalism than I.

Sonja and I agreed Roy was surely the finest human being we had ever met when we left the gallery and made our way back to the art we could afford - the pub's local beer and fine red wine.

From the pub's patio we watched boatload after boatload of red suited whale watchers make their way into and out of the bay. They were doing what they wanted to. We were doing what we wanted to. Hard to beat summer on Vancouver Island.