Yes, it can be checked off our bucket list. We’ve seen bears! Woehoe ?. And before you immediately panic and start yelling at your screen that bears are very dangerous, we were in the car at a safe distance so there was no danger for either party, haha. This week has already started a lot more exciting than last week and it didn’t stop with seeing bears. We’ve had a lot of adventures this week and now that I’m getting into typing this I realize it was a really good week.
At the beginning of the week, we were mainly busy with the home front. As you may know, we rent out our nice house in beautiful Utrecht now that we don’t use it ourselves. Unfortunately, our current tenant reported that he will be going back to Brazil at the end of the month and thus wanted to cancel the lease. We had hoped that our current tenant would continue to live in our house until we came back to the Netherlands. We have very good contact and we are confident that he will take good care of our house. But unfortunately, we had to look for new tenants, our real estate agent had planned viewings for the beginning of the week and we quickly found a suitable candidate, an expat family from India. We hope that these people will look after our house as well as our previous tenant until we return. It’s still a strange feeling that other people are living in your house and that we have to arrange all this remotely from Canada. But we notice that we have already taken a bit more distance in the past year and we are especially happy with the extra money that we can put in our travel jar.
After two long working days in the vegetable garden, it was time to get out and about again. We decided to go for a walk around the Cedar Lakes, for this we had to drive a bit to the other side of the valley. In the village, we made a pit stop to buy a can of bear spray. Until now we had always borrowed this from the family, but because we would stay in bear territory for a while, we thought it was a nice idea to have bear spray ourselves so that we can always take it with us for the rest of our trip. Bear spray is a combination of pepper spray and a red pepper extract that you can use as a last resort when encountering a bad-tempered bear. With the bear spray in our pockets, we drove on to the start of our walk. We drove a bit into the mountains to the ski resort where we had been before. We had already heard from the very nice shop owner that bears could be here on the way. So Lon sat on the lookout, eyes squinted, and all fingers crossed, hoping we might come across a bear. Even though she finds them very scary, she would like to be able to admire them from the safety of the car. And her prayers were heard, for soon we saw a mother bear with her cub grazing by the side of the road. Yes, you read that right, grazing, bears just eat grass. Especially in the spring when there are few berries and other food to be found, a very strange sight. Fortunately, we were able to safely stop nearby and view them very well and calmly. It remains magical to encounter such amazingly powerful animals up close and in the wild. And we were so glad we bought that spray because our walk started 5 min drive from here and those bears won’t be only along the road. After enjoying the bears for a while, we continued our walk. The weather was lovely and we took a nice walk along the lake and through the forest. And luckily we didn’t see any more bears there.
Before going on a bigger adventure at the end of the week, we went on another sidebyside adventure after work. We drove to a waterfall nearby and cruised around, not very special until then. Until I decided that it would also be fun to film with the drone while we were driving. The environment here is so beautiful, with the river running next to the road and all the trees that are there. You may already feel it coming, those trees and a drone have already turned out to be the wrong combination. And now that was, unfortunately, the case again, I was very concentrated and making a nice shot when I suddenly saw a tree very closeby to my screen. The drone hovered for a while, but then fell from the sky. Sadly on the otherwise of the river…. Shit shit shit how are we going to get it back. Going through the river was not an option in any case, due to the cold and the strong current, and after unsuccessfully trying to locate the drone with the zoom lens, we had to think about our options. We came from the other side of the river so we knew there had to be a road but how far it was to the water from the road we didn’t know, luckily google gave us help and we pinned the location on the map where the drone should be. The drone has a very good search function and with the help of this, we were able to determine where to walk into the forest. In bear territory, this is somewhat scary so the bear spray came along and we made our way through the dense forest. And then… we found the drone on the ground and still intact as far as we could see. We were scared that he would be stuck in a tree again somewhere, but luckily he was just lying on the ground. How lucky, of course, it’s stupid that I flew him into a tree but it really couldn’t have gone in a better place and way. The drone survived and is still happily flying around after a total of two collisions with a tree. What a relief.
The big adventure of this week was our trip with Bob to Revelstoke. People had recommended this to us as a nice place with beautiful nature in the immediate vicinity. So on Friday we packed our things, boarded Bob for our adventure, and drove for 2 hours towards Revelstoke. We had found a nice place to sleep at a trailhead of several walks and mountain bike routes where we spent the two nights in Revelstoke. The people hadn’t lied, Revelstoke was a nice place. There was a market going on which we strolled over, visited several trendy shops, and enjoyed a delicious lunch in a nice cafe. We made several walks in the woods in the area where we enjoyed the beginning of spring and beautiful waterfalls. In the evening there was also the Banff mountain film festival taking place in the local cinema where we saw 7 different nature films. From a beautifully shot high adrenaline mountain bike movie in Turkey to grizzly bears in Alaska. It was a wonderful weekend and we thoroughly enjoyed being on the road with Bob again.
That was it again for this week.
Lots of love,
Lon and Jap
Spendings of the Week
Budget per day €54 and per week €378 and per month €1700
| What/Where | Cost [CAD (€)*] |
| Camping | – |
| Eating out | 84,72 (€ 61,70) |
| Parking | – |
| Activities | 50 (€ 36,41) |
| Groceries | 10,71 (€ 7,80) |
| Diesel | 60,02 (€ 43,71) |
| Other | 236,11 (€ 171,96) |
| Total | 441,56 (€ 321,56) |
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