The Taelemans´ Blog

Because the 24th of May is Victoria Day, we had a nice long weekend! Time for another road trip.

We got invited to go to the Okanagan together with some friends. It is a region located in British Columbia defined by the basin of Okanagan Lake and the Canadian portion of the Okanagan River. The region is known for its dry, sunny climate, arid landscapes and lake shore communities. The economy is retirement and commercial-recreation based, with outdoor activities such as boating and water sports, snow skiing and hiking. Agriculture has been focused primarily on fruit orchards, with a recent shift in focus to vineyards and wine.

“Wine Tasting” that was everything we needed to know to get ourselves out there! It still took us 1,5 year to visit that region. It’s not too far away (only 380 km) and it’s a very nice drive. You go through Manning Park (and yes we saw a bear!, lots of deer, coyotes, ground squirrels and various colorful birds).

The weather was gorgeous and therefore ideal for a wine tasting tour. I was driving and Kris and Dulce were tasting. No worries, even though I was driving, I did get to taste what I wanted!

On Sunday we first went to Okanagan Falls to visit The Blasted Church Vineyard. Really nice location, amazing view!

View from the Blasted Church Winery

After buying the first bottles of wine we visited See Ya Later Ranch (one of my personal favorites)!

View from the See Ya Later Ranch.

See Ya Later Ranch wine bottle.

First of all, they were extremely dog friendly, which probably has something to do with the fact that I really liked them, but they also had an amazing ice wine. Definitely one of the better ice wines I’ve ever tried (and trust me, I’ve tried quite a lot).
Besides that I also really liked their vineyard and their branding!

Grizzly after he broke loose from the pole he was tied to (obviously having fun with the winery’s dog).

After buying more bottles of wine we headed to the Naramata Bench. Twenty two wineries are located on this prime agricultural land. Some are situated on the picturesque rolling hillsides while others are perched at the edge of cliffs close to Okanagan Lake. A remarkable setting.

The first winery we visited on the Naramata Bench was Laughing Stock Vineyards. More bottles of wine were purchased:).

Next stop: Popular Grove. Gorgeous winery, amazing view! Besides wine they also sold cheese. Unfortunately the cheese I wanted was sold out, but Dulcie tried some and she loved it!

Popular Grove Winery

Our next stop was Hillside Estate Winery. This time I got to try some wine, because we were going for lunch after at the Hillside Estate Bistro. The food was fantastic! (just to give you an idea of what they were serving: Kris enjoyed the Rare Seared Albacore Tuna Melt and I had the pleasure of trying the Natural Pature’s Chèvre and Tomato Tart.

The unique thing about Hillside Estate is the impressive tower. It kind of dominates the view as you drive north along Naramata Road. The massive structure houses cellars dug deep into the side of the hill with 6.7 metre high walls of solid river rock.

Hillside Estate tower

Last but definitely not least: Elephant Island Winery. My second favorite! You can actually taste the wines outside on their patio with a remarkable view over Okanagan Lake. Of all the wineries we’ve visited, those people seemed the most laid back. They have some very unique fruity wines. We were able to try about 5 different wines. 3 of them really appealed to us: 2 dessert wines: The Cassis and the Framboise (you could taste the Framboise for a small donation, it was to die for!) the other one was the Black Current wine. All three of them were berry flavored.
Ooh and just a little hint, if you ever go there and buy wine, make sure to ask for some food recipes. They have some really nice ones based on some of their wines.

Since most of the wineries close around 5 we decided to head back to the hotel and wait for Ben to return from his soccer tournament.

A picture from our new wine collection:

On Monday we walked around town and gave Grizzly the opportunity to play in the water of Okanagan Lake.

We had a wonderful stay and met some really nice people! Thanks Dulce and Ben!!!

Later this week you can probably expect some pictures of last weekend (when we went to Vancouver Island).

Hope everyone’s having a good time!

It’s been a couple of months already but I’ve just got around taking a look at some of the pictures I took while we were on Vancouver Island during our New Year holiday.
Not too much text in this post, just some pictures. Hope you like them.

Mount Washington Panorama, Vancouver Island.

Campbell river sunset, Vancouver Island.

Blue Heron on the Vancouver Island Coast.

And a final one not from the island, but from Stanley Park in Vancouver:

Prospect Point Panorama, Vancouver

Finally! We’ve waited almost four months to go on this road trip. For some reason we were really, really looking forward to it!

We started driving Thursday evening, direction Kamloops. We booked the Accent Inns for the night. Quite nice actually, pleasant memories! It’s the same hotel chain we stayed at (for 3 weeks) when we first arrived in Vancouver. Funny how all those hotels have the exact same interior.

Friday, early morning (way too early, but for a good cause) we headed in the direction of Jasper. We could have easily made the decision to go straight to Banff, but we wanted to drive along the Icefields Parkway. We’ve visited Jasper before in the summer which was nice, but not at all comparable to the winter scenery. We were even able to walk on the Athabasca Glacier together with Grizzly which was quit fun (and cold). The glacier is actually the most-visited glacier of the North American continent.
I’m not going to talk about climate change, but it is definitely one of the only glaciers I’ve seen that shrunk that much in such a short amount of time. There’s signs everywhere that show you the history of the size of the glacier.

For pictures: Read the rest of this entry »

Pretty much everyone knows that I’m a big fan of Winter. I’ve been looking forward to the first snow, and finally it arrived.

We’ve noticed that the last couple of days, the mountains on the North Shore were getting lots of snow. So today we decided to go to Mount Seymour and enjoy the snow. We were pleasantly surprised with about 50cm of fresh snow!

Of course Grizzly enjoyed this even more than we did! He definitely is a sled dog.

The predictions for next week are really good. They say it’s going to snow a little bit in Vancouver later this week. We’re living up a mountain so chances are pretty high that we’re going to get the first snow up here.

We were told by neighbors to get used to it, because there’s going to be days that we won’t be able to drive down the mountain…

A couple of images taken with my mobile.

Kris and Grizzly

Mount Seymour

Grizzly

Bear Den

Grizzly Paw

Grizzly and me

Rumors are that Whistler Slopes might open next week. Cross our fingers!

The weather has cooled down a bit (quite a bit actually, from 40C to 23C) during the last couple of days, which makes life a bit more enjoyable for Belgians Even the deer were seeking shade and didn’t seem to bother if you approached them. This picture is not cropped and my zoom lens was not even zoomed in to the max (the EXIF says 135mm).

A deer enjoying the shade near our house in Port Moody

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

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

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 watching route

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).

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.

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.

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

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!

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

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.

Ine at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Biathlon Shooting Range

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 in the Georgia Strait

Grizzly smiling for the camera in Golden Ears Provincial Park

A couple of pictures for you to enjoy! The bear picture was taken on Sunday, the other ones are a little bit older (you can tell because there is still snow on the mountains).
Credits go to Kris of course:).

A black bear having an afternoon snack in Whistler, BC.

Evolution of flight

Sea lions posing in front of Mt. Baker.

Samjohn Light in Burrard Inlet.

Mt. Seymour Snowboarding

Last weekend, Kris’ sister and her boyfriend were here to visit us.
On Saturday we did some tourist things: We went to Granville Island, which is always nice because they have amazing pork sausage over there:). Besides that we also went too Gastown and we’ve visited an outlet center not too far from Vancouver. To end a sunny day, we drove to Buntzen Lake (Where Grizzly and I had our first outdoor “swim”. I would love to say that it was nice, but walking around in meltwater is just a tiny little bit too cold for my feet.)

On Sunday the weather was so nice that we decided to go to Lighthouse Park in West Vancouver. We were limited in doing a long hike, so we only did a short one to the viewpoint, Point Atkinson.

Because it was really hot we decided to go to the beach after our park visit. It was the first time for all of us to go there. It was extremely crowded, but we had tons of fun.

I actually went in the water with Grizzly (again). He used to be really afraid of it, so by going in together with him, I’m hoping to get him more familiar with swimming.

Because it was the last evening of Lieve and Thierry their visit, we decided once again to have a very tasteful dinner at Banana Leaf. It is a Malaysian Restaurant on Broadway.

Check out a couple of our pictures.

Point Atkinson

Grizzly watching the Vancouver skyline

Soaked

Lieve and Thierry

We will have some friends coming over next week so we will probably go kayaking with them and of course do some fun stuff. Apart from that I will have to work a couple of weekends next month, so unfortunately I won’t have too much time to think about blogging.

And something incredibly cool:
I am a volunteer for Bear Aware. They are organizing a Bear Aware Open House really soon, so I will also be helping at that event. Again, busy times coming up…

I will paint faces at the Bear Aware Open House:

Practicing my face painting skills

I hope everybody is enjoying the sunshine! Enjoy your week!