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At the beginning of May we decided to get the ferry to Vancouver Island and look around its capital Victoria, which is steeped in English tradition (here you can find the old red phone boxes and double-decker buses.) It was a gloriously hot weekend and we enjoyed browsing at the stalls in the market place and having a pint in the ‘Sticky Wicket’ pub. We stayed in the Youth Hostel, sharing a quad room with a German couple who had just completed the Australia/New Zealand leg of their world tour, so we had plenty to chat about! The following weekend we had decided to make use of the weather and go rollerblading along False Creek, here unfortunately, Tania lost control and fell breaking her right wrist. The next 2 hours were spent in Casualty getting a plaster cast. Tania is already fed up with having to wear the cast (although it has been changed to a lighter fibreglass model) and is looking forward to June 17th when it will be removed. The timing of the fall was fairly convenient as Tania’s brother, Mark, and his family flew out to visit the next weekend and so he was able to extract the Michael on behalf of you all! Having the Davies’ to stay was great fun and we managed to re-explore most of Vancouver’s great sites with them. These included going to the aquarium in Stanley Park - where Rhiannon and Jack were fascinated by the dolphin and Beluga whales, Granville Island - Mark became Jamie Oliver for the afternoon and cooked a stunning array of fresh Chinese seafood dishes and going to Grouse Mountain using the cable car to see the amazing views of downtown Vancouver, whilst sitting in the pleasant sunshine surrounded by snow. We also splashed out and hired a float plane to fly us from Vancouver harbour over a nearby glacier and frozen lake, where the scenery was spectacular -well worth the money! Our last ‘adventure’ with Mark, Sue and the children was to Banff National Park….the distance looked nothing on a map, but it took us 10 hours of driving to reach our chalet! We were extremely lucky on the way there, as we saw a family of Black Bears on the roadside in the middle of nowhere and a Bald Eagle sitting on a rock. That doesn’t happen to you everyday! The mountains and lakes around Banff are totally stunning and we enjoyed walking around the half frozen lake of Lake Johnson in particular. The return trip was just as tedious, although we are now very familiar with children’s nursery rhymes and sing-along-songs!!