The Taelemans´ Blog

The Winter Olympics (Winter itself not so much ) have arrived in Vancouver and everybody in Vancouver is hooked. At work everybody is working with the intranet TV broadcasting on their second monitor and cheering every time Canada gets a medal or scores in hockey. So far Canada has 5 medals of which 2 in snowboarding events and we are of course very curious of what the Belgian Ladies Bobsleigh Team is going to do.

Tomorrow we’re going to one of the nightly Victory Ceremonies where they hand out the medals to the winners and have a concert of a different Canadian artist every night. Tomorrow seems to be Alberta night, so they have an Alberta country artist named Paul Brandt on the schedule

We’ll be Alberta bound when visiting our friends Oli & Saartje in Cochrane, Alberta in a month and a half, so it seemed like the perfect song

On Thursday we’ll be at the Ladies Half-Pipe snowboarding event on Cypress Mountain, which we’re both very much looking forward to and this weekend we’ll spend the whole weekend in Whistler with friends experiencing the Olympic atmosphere over there. It’s going be a great week!

I know I haven’t posted a lot of pictures lately and I’ll try to pick that up again once I get some more spare time.
This picture was taken a couple of weeks ago in Callaghan Valley in Whistler which is right next to the Olympic Nordic sports center where the Ski jumping, Biathlon and Ski Cross events take place.

Alexander Falls, Callaghan Valley

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!

I feel like I have to start all my blog posts with: “I’m sorry we’ve been so busy we didn’t really have time to write something on our blog…”

Having said the previous thing I can start with the actual post!

We did the Whistler Mountain bike thing and it was amazing! It was really intense and a very good exercise for pretty much all your muscles. We got to ride down a mountain:) A fairly big one even!!!:)
No, definitely worth the energy and it’s a good deal, not too expensive!

We started of getting some basic instructions about stances, braking, steering,…

After that we did some trails, downhill. I have to admit that I didn’t really expect it to be that intense, because up until now I only did some mountain biking in “de Ardennen” and I have to say it’s quite different:). Downhill was new to me (since we don’t really have hills in Belgium). We got into a chairlift with our bikes and that took us all the way up the mountain. And I wouldn’t be Ine if I didn’t hate the chairlift part. Not because I’m afraid of heights, not at all, it’s acutally the part where you have to get your bike on one of those things. Kudos to my sweet husband who offered me the easiest spot to get that bike on the rack!

The video below, made with a helmet camera, is from someone that did the same trail (a little bit earlier in the season): B-Line

Anyway there’s not too much going on right now. Summer is almost over, work is slowing down a little bit so there’s time to enjoy some spare time.

So like I said, it’s less busy, our last visitors have left (at least for a while) and we are really looking forward to tomorrow when we head to Vegas! We’re going to stay in Treasure Island.

Treasure Island 2006

We’ve been there before and I absolutely love it! The pool is amazing (you can drink alcohol in it:)) and they have a DJ playing all afternoon! What’s not to love about that?

I’m pretty sure we’ll do some shopping, clubbing and tourist stuff besides drinking beers and cocktails:) We’re going to meet Koen and Tanja in Vegas so it promises to be a very exciting trip!

Mister puppy is going back to the breeder for a while and mister Freggels is getting his own babysitter (thanks Sabine, we owe you big time!).

We hope everyone has a good time and we won’t be able to update our blog until we get back so, again, you’ll have to wait for a while.

I know I haven’t been updating this blog frequently, but lately I didn’t feel like blogging/taking pictures/… so I didn’t
I won’t be writing a lot in this post, just wanted to post some pictures from the last month and a half.

The first picture is a panorama from Canada Place, Vancouver, which is the main cruise ship terminal in Vancouver. It also hosts the Vancouver convention and exhibition center, the Pan Pacific hotel and the 3D Imax theater.
If you look closely, you can see the “Island Princess” cruise ship docked in the middle of the picture. If you ever want to do a cruise to Alaska, Vancouver is your starting point

Canada Place Panorama

The next three pictures are taken during a visit of Fort Langley, “The birthplace of BC”, a former fur trade post of the Hudson’s Bay Company. It is called the birthplace of BC because it played a key role in the establishment of the 49th parallel as the international boundary with the U.S. and was the staging point for prospectors heading up the Fraser Canyon in search of their fortune.
The fort is now a museum explaining the history of the fort and showing life in and around the fort. They have presentations of weapons used during the 1800’s, explanation on the fur trading routes,… Definitely worth a visit if you’re in the area.

Fort Langley

Fort Langley

Fort Langley weapons demonstration

The last picture is taken during a hot day in Lynn Canyon. After a short walk over the suspension bridge and down some rocks, you hit this small natural pool with a waterfall in the back, which is very popular with locals during summer.

Lynn Canyon Pool

That’s it, hmmm… I guess I talked more than I planned to…

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

The weather has been so nice lately that we really have been enjoying our outdoor time.

After a couple of weeks/months of consideration we’ve finally got ourselves a barbecue.
Check out our BBQ below:

No just kidding. I did like it though, but Kris didn’t really want me to get it. Especially because it was extremely expensive (not at all because of the pink).

Anyway, this is what we actually bought.

We tried it and we have to admit it’s definitely a wonderful thing! It’s way faster than our indoor stove…

We weren’t able to do many trip the last couple of days since I have been working, but last weekend was really cool! We had some friends visiting from Belgium (Jeroen and Joke).

We went Kayaking and it was fun! We saw seals and a bald eagle on our tour. We’ll definitely be doing more of that. Hopefully we can go on a five hour tour very soon!

We could not take Mister Grizzly because he wasn’t allowed to go into the water. He’s been neutered since a week and he’s walking around with this beautiful cone around his head. It’s really quite sad. But well, he’ll get over it!

This weekend we get some more visitors: Kris his parents.

So more about that later!

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!