We've been home for about 3 weeks now. The paper I mentioned in my last post got resubmitted and was published last week. One of the master's theses is now complete and the other is out of my hands for a little while. So I've had some time to sort through all 7794 photos that we took on the trip and I selected a mere 287 that are worth sharing. So far, Leah and I have gone through all the Australia pictures and added captions. They're posted online now so you can check them out. New Zealand and Thailand pictures will follow but life is likely going to get in the way so they may take some time. I also started drafting more blog posts but those will take even longer to appear.
In the meantime, a few post-trip thoughts seem appropriate. Before we left, we had dinner with our friends Anne and Todd. They are avid travellers and gave us some useful advice. One of the "rules of travel" that they try to stick to is the "camera rule". Occasionally, you leave the hotel for dinner or to pick something up at the pharmacy across the street and, on your way, you see something that simply demands being photographed. And you camera is in the hotel room. So the rule is "don't go anywhere without a camera". We didn't stick to this rule in a totally strict sense (e.g. the camera didn't come SCUBA diving with us) but whenever the question arose and the answer wasn't obvious, we took it. This definitely worked out for us on many occasions, even though it meant lugging around a DLSR with two lenses (the rule has a simple extension that covers lenses - you can see this degenrating, can't you?).
Upon our return to Vancovuer, we took the skytrain from the airport to our house and sat at the very front of the train (Leah's favourite seat). For those unfamiliar, the Canada Line has no driver so the front seat has a huge window looking forward. I'd never had a camera with me on the skytrain before so I started taking pictures. This is the best one I took. Perhaps a familiar Vancouver scene but certainly not one that does full justice to the city. Unfortunately, I'm rarely carrying my camera with me when the best Vancouver moments arise. That's when it occurred to me that the rationale behind the camera rule extends beyond travel. So I've been carrying my camera around with me, not all the time but certainly more than usual. These are some of the things I've seen and photographed around Vancouver, courtesy of the camera rule.
Kelly, my graduate student, had to abandon her cat, Rafi, for a couple weeks so I did feeding duty one day. Still suffering from jetlag, I was awake before dawn (not hard this time of year) and got a few pictures on the cat-feeding expedition. The picture to the right is the morning frost on the grass in front of our house.
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| Rafi |
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| The view down Cambie toward downtown Vancouver and the Lions in the distance. |
I took this next photo at Queen Elizabeth Park. The lighting and weather weren't great that day but I got photos of a heron, buffleheads, mallards, wigeons and robins. I'm only including the squirrel here because while traveling around Australia, we kept marvelling at all the exotic animals but we never saw black squirrels. So here's a black squirrel. How exotic, eh? You really have to leave home and come back to see it the way everyone else sees it (especially the Japanese tourists who seem to be mesmerized by black squirrels).
After 6 years of living in Vancouver, my good friends and climbing buddies Annemarie and Ryan decided to move to California. While walking over to their place to hang out with them before they took off, I crossed paths with a flock of pigeons in the middle of a crazy figure-eight loop-to-loop around a couple big buildings. I must have watched them do 5 or 6 laps and got a few dozens shots of them in action. I didn't realize what was going on in this particular photo (and I'm still not really sure) until I looked them over on my computer. A little mid-flight snuggling? Or just a momentary collision?
A former student of mine has been getting into backcountry skiing recently and I hadn't skied in the backcountry yet this year so we headed up to the Coquihalla to ski Needle Peak. This is Caroline skinning up toward the summit ridge.
Messing around with prolonged exposures in the Broadway and Cambie skytrain station on the way to pick Leah up at the airport on her way home from Christmas in Vernon.
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Leah, goofing around at a park near the Reifel Bird Sanctuary. |
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An old man showing off his duck-catching skills for his granddaughter at the Reifel Bird Sanctuary. |
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A Sandhill crane at Reifel. |
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| A cormorant near the Cambie Bridge. |
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| Great blue heron at the Lost Lagoon. |
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| Science World across False Creek. |
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| Totem pole in Stanley Park |
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| River otter on the Seawall |
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| Lions Gate Bridge |
