The Taelemans´ Blog

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!

If I have to call out one thing I became addicted to since we moved to Vancouver, it’s gotta be Hockey. I’ve never been much of a sportsfan, but there is something about hockey which attracts me (and of course working on the best NHL game requires one to keep up to date and go out to research ).

The Vancouver Canucks are doing great in the playoffs at this moment (knock on wood), they are currently 2-1 ahead in the second round of the Stanley Cup Playoffs against the Chicago Blackhawks. Go Canucks Go! On to the Stanley Cup

Here are various pictures of hockey matches I’ve been to in the last couple of weeks. The first set is from the Vancouver Canucks first round game against the St. Louis Blues whom they swept out of the playoffs with a massive 4-0 sweep.

Ryan Kesler, Vancouver Canucks (Ine her favorite player)

Canucks Score!!

Group hug! (Very manly though)

GM Place Jumbotron

The next pictures are taken at game seven of the second round of the WHL Playoffs against the Spokane Chiefs. They won, but lost the Western Conference final against the Kelowna Rockets.

Giants Vs Chiefs Fight

PNE Minitron (Compared to the GM Place one at least)

We had a bit of a lazy Sunday, which created some time for me to do some photo filtering/processing. We had an early start due to a dog incident… (just spent 100$ on new blinds so we wouldn’t be woken up by the light anymore…), so we headed out for a 10K hike around Buntzen Lake, which is about 2-3km from our home and afterward we went for lunch at our favorite Sushi Place, where we treated ourselves to Spicy Tuna Sashimi, Spicy salmon sashimi, an “awesome roll” (it was actually very good, but that’s just the name) and Ebi Gyoza, price: 28$(+-18EUR) (including drinks). Can’t beat that price
We finished it of with a visit to Starbucks where I got a “Double chunky chocolate chip frappuccino” and Ine got something similar with strawberry (Basically these are more or less milkshakes, but starbucks likes to fancy up the names…).

Huge seaweed, Pacific Rim

A view on the Pacific Ocean in Pacific Rim National Park, BC

St. Aidan On-the-Hill in Ucluelet

That’s it for me for Tofino, I have plenty more, but that would just bore you all. I have so much stuff left to post I’ll just continue to go through them when I find some time.

Here are some more pictures from our trip to Ucluelet – Tofino – Pacific Rim National Park on Vancouver Island.

Totem Pole on the Pacific Rim

Boardwalk through the rainforest, Pacific Rim National Park”

Ucluelet Welcome Sign

Pacific Rim Motel Bear Carving

Boardwalk, Pacific Rim National Park

Western Skunk Cabbage (What a name…)

Mussels, Pacific Rim National Park