some of this is true

From Bowen Island, in a quiet bed and breakfast with a balcony looking back towards the mainland, the city lights Vancouver keep the night sky polluted with an orage haze, and it looks like a sunset on smokey days back in Calgary, when forest fires in the mountains fogged the air for hundreds of miles. The bright light from the full moon mixes in with the urban glow, and in photos as the light smears across the digital sensor, it almost looks like a sunrise.

We spent two nights on the island, hiking past fish latters, walking through forests along paths where the signs explain the right of way: bikes yield to pedestrians, and both yield to horses. A guy in a horse wearing a dark smooth helmet passes us with his dog, and I nervously shallow my breathing because it doesn’t take much horse to get my allergies going, although I should know better than to think that would do much good. We tried fishing at Killarney Lake, our hooks getting caught in weeds and resting on lilly pads, the fish either avoiding the small pieces of herring on the ends of our lines or maybe there aren’t any fish to begin with. A visit to the local museum, which is mostly  about local gardening,which is difficult, the captions on the photos explain, because the island is mostly rock and lush gardens need soil. But that’s no big problem for the people of Bowen Island, with their million-dollar homes along the water and their yachts in Snug Cove and, of course, gardening budgets that include shipping in soil from more fertile ground. The Strawberry Tea and Bizaar at the local church, where old ladies in bright red hats sell tarts and jam. The Cocoa West Chocolatier, where I bought a chocolate ball covered in paprika.

Bowen Island is away from the city, a half-hour drive (or an hour in a half on Friday as a Critical Mass ride shut down the bridge) and then a 20-minute ferry ride, but close enough that you’re reminded you haven’t gone far. The radio stations from Vancouver still come through with reasonable clarity, the stream of traffic coming off the ferry from the mainland are city folk just like you, and many of the people either lived in Vancouver at some point or commute there for work every day. But it was far enough to feel removed, even for a couple of days, relaxing on an island surrounded by ocean water, walking along the beach, or through the forest, or to the taco stand by the ferry terminal waiting for a ride home.

I took some photos, which you can see here.

And I made a movie:

So I never did tell you about my trip to the UK, the pubs and castles and ghost tours and musicals and comedy shows and fish and chips and stone circles and the rest of it, as much of the rest of it as you can fit into two shorts weeks in the country, split between London, a few days in Scotland, and then down to the capital of Wales and points west back to the nation’s capital.

I told you about the Volcanic Ash Cloud of Doom, which represented, let’s be honest, only a small inconvenience, a longer train ride, emails for a refund, and not even a very interesting story to go along with it. I even made it home on time.

I returned almost two months ago, almost to the day, the long, tired flight home on April 23, an Air Canada employee noticing the same date on my passport and wishing me a happy birthday. The bad George Clooney movie on the plane, the chicken parmigiana in a plastic dish, and my inability to sleep in flight.

The trip had a particularly leisurely pace, at first owing to jet leg, but then because it just felt relaxing, which was, after all, part of the point. Sleeping in on Nicole’s couch, finding a place to eat breakfast and drink coffee and read the morning news in the Guardian (how very cliche), find an activity or two to fill in the day, and then dinner and a pub with Nicole at night.

The trip included many of the things you’d expect I suppose, my first time in the London or anywhere in the UK, hitting obvious landmarks like the Parliament buildings (closed on account of the election), Westminster Abbey, a ride on the clipper up the Thames to the observatory in Greenwich, St. Paul’s Catherdral, the British museum, Hyde Park, Buckingham Palace, et cetera.

At night we found food at places like Brick Lane and a few good pubs, including a “hidden pubs” walking tour that was mostly places Nicole had been to before. There was the Ghost Bus Tour, which was actually quite hilarious and what I would imagine a ghost tour organized by the Monty Python folks would be like. The Legally Blonde musical, partly for irony but it was actually quite good, too, and a Jimmy Carr stand-up show in Woking.

Nicole came to Scotland, overnight on the train, and then a two-day Loch Ness tour with a hilarious nationalist Scottish guy who reminded me of my old news editor, and a (very brief) dip in the Loch itself, which was by far the coldest water I’ve ever been in. And I ate haggis, which was spicy and crunchy and delicious.

And then Nicole had to return to reality and I was on my own in Cardiff, Wales, which reminded me a lot of Halifax and where I saw Ricky Gervais tell jokes in a big theatre, and then the Roman baths in Bath and stone circles in Stonehenge and Avebury, which is larger and older but less complex than Stonehenge but quiter and by far more interesting.

I rented a car, driving on the left through rolling green hills filled with sheep and cows to Stonehenge and Avebury and I managed to pop a tire, which wasn’t free.

And then it was over, and when I returned to Pacific Standard Time to a city under grey skies (it was, you wouldn’t believe, so sunny there), I slept for days and didn’t unpack fully for weeks.

For more photos: Picasa web albums

And here is a video I made:

The volcanic ash cloud of doom, according to the BBC, is still there but not there enough to cause death and disaster, or perhaps the government was worried about prolonging the “crisis”, as it is called, during an election, so flights are leaving again and Britons will have their pineapples and East Asian orchids and Kenyan roses once again, thank god. Even the seagulls that live at the massive rugby stadium across the river from the hostel here in Cardiff seem especially loud this morning, rejoicing, no doubt, at the news that they can fly high once again.

Air Canada, god love them, still hasn’t posted a note about how things will go as the week goes on, but I’ll continue on and assume everything is well in hand and, come Friday, our flight path I’m sure will stay as far away from the cloud of doom as possible.

It’s sunny today, the latest pleasant day on a trip without rain, and my first stop will be a castle that no doubt has an audio guide, hundreds of people wandering around with headphones bumping into each other and, through the magic of audio recording, travelling back in time to a world without volcanos or ash clouds of doom or, I presume, pineapples.

The skies above Edinburgh were a bright mix of blue and grey this morning, with a gentle wind cooling off a pleasant day. You can’t see the volcanic ash cloud of doom that has washed over — from what I can tell — the entire civilized world, can’t smell it, can’t taste it. But it’s there, hanging over the United Kingdom while grinding life — or some reasonable fascimile of it — to a stop.

Today I was supposed to fly from Edinburgh (from where Nicole and I went on a tour to Loch Ness, where we swam, very briefly, in the frigid water but saw no monster) to Wales, but the flight was grounded lest tiny pieces of ash and gas melt the engine, which would not be good, apparently. It wasn’t a huge deal, of course, because the train heads the same place, albiet more expensive and longer, but still quite nice along the English countryside, rolling green fields and sheep and cows.

It is, naturally, all that most people are talking about here,  jokes and comments peppering cash register conversations, stories of woe making for easy eavesdropping. The newspapers have been unable to resist the references to World War Two (Britons stranded on the the beaches of France; chaos in the air not seen since the days of Hitler), and there is a real sense of panic on the covers of the tabloids. The tourism and airline industries will collapse. Japanese flowers are running low. Some grocery stores have already run out of pineapples. How bad will things become?

I’ve still got five days until I’m due to fly out of here, and predictions aren’t worth much, changing, it seems, by the hour. So I’m going to plug along, tomorrow here in Cardiff, Wales, Wednesday in Bath and Thursday in Avebury and Stonehenge and back to London, and I suppose I’ll deal with the rest when it comes. In the meantime, I’ll have to settle for canned pinapples.

Here's where I'm going, mostly

The batteries and iPod are charging, and the clothes are busy tumbling in the dryer, and let’s be honest, I won’t get around to packing them until tomorrow, which is when my flight lights off over the Atlantic, but that’s not for hours so everything will be fine.

I’ll be in the UK for just under two weeks, the first week or so in London hanging out with Nicole and wandering around museums and castles and a comedy show and a musical before we head north to Scotland to find the Loch Ness Monster, which we will see, obviously.

And then it’s just me, to Cardiff in Wales and Bath and Stonehenge, which is old and broken compared to newer Stonehenge that I saw last year in the United States of America on the side of a hill in the 40-degree desert heat, where it was just called “Stonehenge,” as if it was the only one that mattered. And then it’s back to London, just like that, and off on a plane back to Vancouver, leaving on my birthday, which, with the time changes in the air will be the longest birthday I’ve had, but I’ll be owed those hours anyway.

Perhaps I’ll post updates along the way, if there’s time and Internet and something interesting to say, which I imagine there will be, even for a line or two and a picture of something pretty.