Hubby and I spent the past four days camping at Cross Lake Provincial Park about three and a half hours northwest of here. Amazingly, in spite of the fact that Alberta has been experiencing near-historic rainfall over the past month, we enjoyed four days of beautiful sunshine and it wasn’t until we were tucked into bed in the trailer last night that the rain began to fall again.
In addition to all the rain, Alberta has also been experiencing a massive infestation of tent caterpillars, a natural phenomenon that peaks every 10 to 12 years. Located in the boreal forest that encompasses almost the entire northern half of the province, the campground was overrun with these hairy little critters.
Although we love to spend most of our time outdoors when we’re camping, we ate our first supper in the trailer to avoid the caterpillars and when we were outside that evening, we literally had to tuck our pants into our socks to keep them from crawling up the inside of our pant legs!
One place where there were no caterpillars was out on the water. The main Cross Lake Provincial Park campground offers 130 lovely powered sites, but across a wide bay and accessible only by foot or by boat, is rustic George’s Point campground with seven tent only sites. For the first of our two kayaking excursions, we packed a lunch and paddled over to George’s Point for a picnic. We were the only ones there and this is the view that we enjoyed.
While kayaking, we saw families of ducks and loons as well as gulls and other water birds, but we were especially delighted to spot a bald eagle. There’s no way to keep a kayak perfectly still on the water, so taking good photos, especially those that require zooming in, is extremely challenging. Needless to say, I’m pretty happy with this one…
When we got back to our campsite later that day, it was lierally like walking into a horror movie! Every surface was crawling with caterpillars… thousands and thousands of caterpillars! Thankfully, we’d heard from another camper that there weren’t many of them on the far side of the campground where there were more evergreen trees and less of the deciduous ones that the caterpillars feed on. The campground was far from full, so we asked and were given permission to move. It was a lot of extra work, especially for hubby, but it was definitely worth it. Although there were still a few creepy crawlies, we were able to enjoy the remainder of our stay.
We weren’t able to do as much hiking as we might have as many of the trails looked like this…
Thankfully though, although we had to carefully skirt around a couple of huge puddles, the trail from the campground to French Creek, which flows out of the lake, was passable and we even found the only geocache located in the park while we were on that hike.
Now we’re home and it’s raining again, but at least there are no caterpillars here!
Divorced for more than two decades, Yannick and Kathleen have not seen or spoken to one another for nineteen years when they receive the news that human remains have been unearthed on Vancouver Island. Could this be their daughter, Una, who disappeared without a trace over twenty years earlier? This unimaginable shared loss brings them together for a cross-Canada trip from Ontario all the way to the Pacific Coast.
Buying a Piece of Paris is a charming memoir about the Australian author’s humorous and challenging quest to find and purchase an apartment in Paris. With only two weeks to locate and secure the apartment of her dreams, something exuding character and Parisian chic, Ellie embarks on what seems an almost impossible pursuit. Armed with only a cursory grasp of the language, she finds herself trying to navigate the bewildering French real estate market with its unique customs, quirky agents, and unexpected cultural hurdles. All in all, a very entertaining read and especially so since, although I’ve only spent five days in Paris, I could visualize many of the places that she mentioned and the kind of buildings she visited in her frantic and sometimes hilarious search for the perfect place to call home.
After moving with her husband to the tiny, bustling city of Macau, across the Pearl River delta from Hong Kong, Grace Miller finds herself a stranger in a very foreign land. Facing the devastating news of her infertility and a marriage in crisis, Grace resolves to do something bold, something that her impetuous mother might have done. Turning to her love of baking, she opens Lillian’s, a café specializing in coffee, tea, and delicate French macarons. In this story of love, friendship, and renewal, Lillian’s quickly becomes a sanctuary where women from different cultural backgrounds come together to support one another.
At seven years old, Suzanne Heywood set sail from England with her parents and younger brother on what was supposed to be a three-year trip around the world retracing one of Captain Cook’s voyages. What followed was a decade of isolation on a 70-foot sailboat crossing some of the world’s most dangerous oceans and surviving horrendous storms, shipwrecks, and reefs. What sounded like the romantic adventure of a lifetime became a child’s worst nightmare “trapped inside someone else’s dream”.
Following Augustine 