Jul 29

The weather has been way too warm the last couple of days. It’s currently midnight and it still is 25C outside. When we arrived home at 6:30, the temperature was still 36C. I do enjoy warm weather, but I didn’t sign up for Vegas temperatures when I moved to Vancouver. The dog is panting so much I had to get a wet towel to cover him up, now he won’t go anywhere without his wet towel…

This weekend was really cool (but warm…), we got some new visitors over, so we got back to doing touristy things. On Saturday we did the mandatory Whistler trip which was nice, but no bears and the biathlon shooting range was closed due to construction :( The town was very lively due to mountain biking and summer ski on the glacier so it was still very nice walking around in downtown Whistler.
We headed back to Vancouver in the evening and started seeing lightning flashes after dinner in Squamish. On the way back we saw the most amazing thunderstorm of which I only have one picture before all hell broke lose since the rain was just too heavy to stop for pictures (and tripods in the middle of a furious thunderstorm seems to be asking for it…).


Thunderstorm disrupts Lion's bay sunset
Thunderstorm disrupts Lion’s bay sunset

The combination with sunset and thunderstorms proved to be an incredible sight as everything you could see was colored orange/red. At a certain point I had to put my car in the forest to protect it from the huge hail balls which were bashing the car.

On Saturday we went whale watching again, this time with much better luck then last time. We saw about 20 Orcas including some calves (baby whales :) ), Ine managed to capture a great movie of a calf breaching. (It seems like flickr video screwed up the framerate of the movie or so, but well…)

This is a picture of another calf doing a mini breach, damn those guys are hard to capture…


Orca Calf breaching on the BC coast
Orca Calf breaching on the BC coast

Update: Comment by the people from the Orca Network:

“This is the strangest breach photo we’ve seen! It creates a sort of “optical illusion” – the whale is upside down, with its head turned away from the camera (which means it must be a young whale that has the flexibility to move its head in that manner – adults can’t turn their heads like this!”

That’s all for now, good night! :)

Update: One more thing I somehow forgot last night. I got this really cool GPS gadget from Ine’s brother (Thanks Jeroen!) which allows you to track and store the route you took just by having it on you. You can afterwards plot your route, synchronize camera data with it, …
Here is the route we took on our whale watching trip:

Whale Trip Route
Whale watching route

Jul 20

I haven’t gotten around updating the blog lately due to some very busy weeks and the launch of new versions and remakes of some of my all time favorite games: Monkey Island and Battlefield :) Tonight, I forced myself not to play and to upload some pictures to the blog. It’s a bit of a chaotic post of unrelated events, but well..

Thursday after work we met up with a friend of ours in downtown Vancouver, had a lovely walk on the seawall, ate some great takeaway Shawarma (it took me some time to actually figure out that it was Shoarma…) on the beach and finished it all of with a Marble Slab ice cream (Best ice cream ever).

Vancouver English Bay Panorama
English Bay in Downtown Vancouver

Last weekend we decided to due a quick day trip to Seattle. The morning started out great with some deer standing near our house (it seems to be deer season, we’ve seen about 10 of them around our house in one week), drove over to Seattle and did a quick visit to the city. We only stayed in Seattle for 2 hours and decided to drive to Bellevue where we saw Bill Gates’ house and ended the day with a great fondue menu at The Melting Pot.

Seattle Qwest Football Field
Mount Rainier rising up behind the Seattle Thunderbirds’ home, Qwest field.

Below are some more pictures of when my parents where visiting and we visited Cypress Mountain. It was strange to see the Vancouver 2010 Olympic half pipe in summer. This winter, we’ll be more or less at the exact same spot as we got tickets for the woman’s halfpipe event.


Vancouver 2010 Olympic Halfpipe
My parents, Ine and Grizzly posing in front of the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Halfpipe on Cypress Mountain.


Cypress Mountain viewpoint
My father on the Cypress mountain viewpoint overlooking the lower mainland and the Georgia Straight.

In a few days we’ll have some new visitors, so we definitely have more to look forward to!

Jul 7

Sorry for the recent lack of updates but we had some busy weeks and more coming up. My parents came over to visit us for 3 weeks (too short) and we had a great time wine tasting, doing hikes, …
Here is a picture of my lovely mother in Vancouver:

My mother in Vancouver
My mother in Vancouver

We also did a short day trip to Whistler where we visited the Olympic skijump and biathlon area. At the Biathlon shooting range you could try out a biathlon rifle and shoot at the targets. Ine beat me with a perfect 5/5 score against my less perfect 4/5. I had a bad bullet… On our way we saw 2 bears (see previous post for picture). We ended the day with a very nice dinner at the Rimrock Cafe.

Vancouver 2010 Olympic Biathlon shooting range
Ine at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Biathlon Shooting Range

Vancouver 2010 Olympic Skijump
Vancouver 2010 Olympic Skijump

Below are two more shots from the previous weeks, I still have a huge backlog to process and I’ll try to post some more soon.

Bald Eagle on the rocks
Bald Eagle on the rocks in the Georgia Strait

Grizzly at Golden Eagle Regional Park
Grizzly smiling for the camera in Golden Ears Provincial Park