Caravan Farm Theatre - Summer 2007

This is gonna be a long one, so I thought I'd just leave a place marker and a weblink so you can roughly what we were up to, www.caravanfarmtheatre.com

More to follow . . .

Fernie - bit late, this one . . .

Blog – 2nd August

Howdy folks, it’s been a little while since our last entry. Currently we are stretched out, in the shade, on a long swing chair on the banks of the River Shuswap. There’s absolutely nothing needed doing for the rest of the day, save enjoy the dry hot heat of the Okanagans. Seems as good as any other time to catch up on a little blogging.
To bring us up to speed we caught the Greyhound out of Fernie at 3.15am on a Sunday morning en route to our new jobs at the Caravan Farm Theatre.
This entry will be a little short on photographic content: This is why. On the tourist brochures for the lake city of Kelowna (containing, apparently, the highest quoitient of millionaires per square mile in Canada) the slogan reads ‘ripe with surprises’. Too bloody right since, during our five hour stopover, we learned that Kelowna’s other numerous brand of citizenry are crackheads, one of whom lifted Em’s handbag from the back of her chair in the restaurant in which we were eating. Say hello, wave goodbye to wallet, iPod, specs, camera and most vitally Em’s pack of Werther’s originals.
On the upside we were then treated to a genuinely alternative tourist ride in the back of an RCMP cop car around Kelowna’s cracktown. Our cop was called Kevin and seemed to rather relish the idea of all the ‘bad guys’ he was battling, as well as wondering at the British’s reticence to arming our cops to the teeth.
At one point on the tour he stopped the car next to three shiny looking teenage girls.
“Hey ladies.” Said Kevin
“Hi,” giggle the girls.
“You’re not crack smokers by any chance?” Asks our Kev.
Blush, giggle, horror, shock went the girls, clearly not potent street drug users.
“Well, be careful on these streets,” carries on Kev, clearly intent on sowing a little paranoia in their midst. “they’re full of bad guys.”
Exit three nervy girls, pursued by an ever darkening world view.

On the upside we had bus tickets and a job with accommodation and food waiting for us in Armstrong, as well as a certain amount of resilience to bad luck. We waved goodbye to Kelowna with the traditional two-fingered British salute and carried on North to what seems to be turning out to be a small sector of Canadian paradise.

Our time in Fernie was very quiet, sweltering in a 120 bed hostel with single figure occupancy in the dog days of summer. We loved it; great people, wonderful hikes, bear fear and all. I’m mildly chuffed at navigating a downhill mountain bike route that the locals understatedly described as ‘gnarly’, only falling off twice, only riding into two or three trees or bushes, and arriving at the bottom more or less unharmed. There was a fair amount of time spent in the River Elk. First, unsuccessfully, we went tubing which essentially means plonking your arse onto an inflatable item and allowing the river to take you downstream. The water is coming down from the mountains where the snow is still melting and is freezing. You dip your toes into the water and it hurts, and if anything gets worse the longer you remain in the water. Our maiden voyage saw us enter the river at precisely the wrong point; we were swept into the trees on the river bank, the inflatable overturned and we bounced off the rocks that punctuated the water. Then we did precisely the same thing again, Em most put out at one of her fiery hair bands departed on the long trip to the ocean. The next day we cracked it and Em managed to defy some basic physical laws by making her inflatable travel at a slower speed than the river was travelling. I discovered that a baseball cap, even if worn while fully immersed , can keep a cigarette and matches dry enough to enjoy a mid river puff. Having had a little practice we then went for the real thing and went white water rafting on the River Elk, further down where it gets a lot more exciting. Cliff jumping but no bears though.

(Gonna cut this one short, as it's actually now 24th September, we're in Vancouver, and we have a lot of catching up to do, ooops.)

Fernie!

We saw a bear a few hours ago, in the wild as they say; a Black Bear cub. We were on our way back from a hike to the base of Mount Procter, wending our way along a rough path through thick alpine forest, the town a good five or six kilometres away, when we heard a scuffling in the brush. We looked about 5 or 6 metres to our right and saw the bear, about the size of big kid’s toy whizzing, squirrel style and surprisingly quickly, up the side of a birch tree.


In some ways bears are like the ultimate superheroes; they can outrun you, outclimb you, outswim you and they’re strong enough to rip your head off if they fancy ripping your head off. Or they might just disembowel you. As far as I know they can’t outjump humans but since my longest ever long jump is about 5 feet it’s not really an issue. While this bear looked just as cute as bears can, the thought struck us that Momma or Poppa bear might not be far off and, while not as juggernauty as Grizzlies they can get up to 300+ pounds and when the kids are concerned are prone to getting a touch irate. We left.

You don’t get bears in central Vancouver. The reason we saw this one is because last Monday we took an 18hour Greyhound bus ride directly east out of the City and up into the Southern tip of the Canadian Rockies. After passing through, and stopping in, every small town on the way – Chilliwack, Hope, Vernon, Nelson, Creston, Cranbrook and about a million others – we decanted in the very cool and elegantly bijou-esque ‘city’ of Fernie. It’s an old mining town, down in the valley below the Lizard Range, on the banks of the Elk River, and surrounded on all sides by bloody great mountains. We’re 1000m above Vancouver, which is at sea level, and the largest of the mountains around us is 1700m above us. As I said, big buggers.


We’re working at the Raging Elk hostel for accommodation, having decided we wanted to get out of the City for the Summer. Fernie is a serious skiing destination and, conversely, is pretty quiet during the Summer, despite also being a world class mountain biking town. I’m typing this on a warm evening on the balcony of the almost empty hostel, facing West in the direction of Polar Peak. On Friday night it was from this direction that we were hit by the edge of a tornado. It had been a stifling hot day and we’d burnt ourselves out by accidentally going on a 25k bike jaunt (we’ve imported Dirk & Dotty, our bikes, out here with us) mostly uphill to the Island Park Lodge. There had just been a cloudburst which cooled the air down nicely and I was busy telling the Canadians that we’d seen all the storm we were going to see that evening when the temperature sank and everything above the mountain range turned black and the sky seemed to start flying toward us. The wind suddenly hit us incredibly hard, rain smashed down and the air was full of lightning. A large trampoline in the garden was pushed 15 feet along the garden, thunder ripped out and the lights all across town went out as something, somewhere must have been struck or ripped out of the ground. For half an hour or so we watched from the windows of the darkened hostel then it just died away. An hour later the sky was clear again and we felt safe enough to go on a pub crawl around Fernie’s four pubs. That was good too.


The tornado didn’t manage to put a stop to the Town’s first ever Fernie Fest though. These Canadians are a never-say-die, can-do bunch. We’d e-mailed around Fernie seeing if we could pick up a bit of work before we arrived and someone had suggested volunteering at the local Festival. It sounded fun so we signed up. On the Friday afternoon (just after our 15000km bike bender) we popped down to the site to see if they needed any help just setting up. They didn’t, having pretty much just put the finishing touches to the main stage and all the parameters. Three hours later almost every single construction had been ripped out like rotten teeth and bent out of all shape. They started a little late on the Saturday but virtually carried on as planned. A seriously good effort.

Fernie Fest was great fun, similar in spirit to the Shambala festival we’ve been going to in the UK for about the last five years or so but the setting was just incredible. Em was the popcorn lady on Saturday night and I didn’t get down there, with a satchel full of booze, ‘til after 11pm. The last live band were still going at 2am and we didn’t leave ‘til after 4. The woods were lit by lanterns and led into the dance area; we sat by the river as it sloshed past and met some great people, what a fantastic atmosphere.

Sunday we ran the main gate and enjoyed the general level of goodwill before heading back into town to watch the Canada Day fireworks against the monolithic blackness of Mount Fernie from the roof of the hostel.

The last few of weeks in Vancouver were a mix of fun and stress. My construction job in Bowen came to an abrupt halt as we gradually realised our boss had several bad habits, one of which involved our wages going straight up his nose. Luckily I only ended up $200 down while our mates were owed full week’s wages. It’s ongoing and we may or may not have heard the end of it. Other things: I finally got to go to a baseball match. While it’s clearly not as good a game as cricket it has plenty to recommend it. Not least the beer and the foot long hotdogs. A few weeks previously we spent a weekend at a hostel in the town of Cumberland on Vancouver Island checking out a possible job – it didn’t materialise but it was fun cycling around on Cruiser bikes, watching Em realise that the water in glacial lakes just keeps getting colder and colder, and seeing all the street names correspond to the Lake District where the in-laws live. We had a good time in Vancouver and met some great people but time and opportunity just roll on.

Update: Em’s just dragged me up another mountain and is now collapsed in a hammock in the back garden. Despite my chronic fear of heights Em somehow keeps managing to continually drag me up things. We took a 2.6km wobbly ski lift up into the local ski hills and then hiked up to the nearest summit which is over 2000 metres above sea level; naturally the views are incredible, mountains as far as the eye can see and the eye can see a pretty long way. I walked down, watching out for bears, while Em went into rhapsodies over how ‘floaty’ the return trip, on a flimsy bit of cable, was.


Next weekend we move on to the Caravan Farm Theatre near Armstrong where we’ll be running their Front of House and Box Office for the next five or six weeks. It’s all under canvas and average summertime temps are in the mid 30s. Hmmm.

The Grouse Grind

It hurt. A lot. It took us 1 hour 25 mins.

Grouse Grind stats as follows:-

Length of Grouse Grind: 2.9 km (1.8 miles)
Grouse Grind elevation gain: 853 metres (2,800 feet)
Average completion time: 1.5 hours.
Fastest completion time for men: 26:26 held be Michael Simpson, set at the 2005 Grouse Grind Mountain Run.
Fastest completion time for women: 32:54 held by Kelly Matoul, set at the 2002 Grouse Grind Mountain Run.
Number of Grinders each year: over 100,000

I love endorphins, they rock.

Kittens!

This is probably the only time in my life this will happen, so I thought I'd write about it. Yesterday at work I was told by my supervisor to go and look at kittens. The exact words used were "hey, just kick back and relax - go and look at some kitten sites or something." She then emailed me a link to a kitten site, this one to be precise:-

Because there's no such thing as too many kittens

http://www.flickr.com/groups/babycats/pool/

And so I did. Bear in mind that I have not exactly been over-worked in this job, so to kick back and relax any more would probably involve lying on the floor and sleeping! Ace.

Working 9 to 5 . . .

Emma again, this time typing from her very own office (!) up at the University of British Columbia. And yes, as you can probably tell by the fact that I'm writing this blog, rather than working, I'm a tad bored ;-) So what's been happening in the world of Emma and Jan lately? Well, Jan is still building things on Bowen Island - Emma had to stop as the cement was making her poor hands disintegrate. Jan played golf last week so isn't having a too horrendous time, although it does mean that Emma and Jan are currently living on two separate land-masses :-( Still, Jan's back tonight, hooray!, and we're looking forward to a (hopefully) dry weekend - Saturday is the Dragon Boat Race in False Creek, and Sunday is the Commercial Drive Car-Free Day, and then a BBQ on Jericho Beach. Nice.


So what's Emma up to? Well, all those years ago when she first went to work in London after unniversity, she worked as a temp for a month in the Maths Dept of Imperial College. Now, 7 years later, she's back in a Maths Dept, this time the Pacific Institute of Mathematical Sciences at UBC, trying to get some invitations printed for a conference. Maybe it's a cyclical thing, in which I wonder which Maths Dept in which country it's going to be in 2014.

At lunch, she's probably going to sit in the Rose Garden, looking at Bowen Island, where Jan is working (see picture), although it's a bit damp outside so she might not . . . S'not a bad view all the same - in fact, it's rather stunning what with the snow-capped glaciers in the background. She's also just found out that she's getting a free lunch next Friday, hooray! - gotta love these Canadian Staff Appreciation days ;-)

Anyways, the reason we're both slogging away on different land-masses is because we're off for the summer, to the Rockies! We're off to a little place called Fernie, and then we might be off to work at the Caravan Farm Theatre, fingers crossed. Just to make you jealous, here's a picture of Fernie:-



We'll keep you posted when we have more news . . . (And photos of us rather than ones nicked from t'interweb).

Building on Bowen

This week we have mainly been building houses on Bowen Island, a little chunk of paradise in between the mainland and Vancouver Island (‘The Island’ as the locals have it). There’s a great website over here called Craigslist which is full of adverts both professional and private. We’ve bought bikes from it (Dotty & The Diggler are currently resting out in the back garden), Em’s found a Samba band to join and I’m writing for a new arts magazine through it and we’ve both become builders (of a sort) through the mighty list of Craig. We could also, if inclined, furnish a house with free stuff, get jobs in ‘adult’ entertainment or just simply have some random sex with bored strangers from the same site.*

Anyway Ted & Heather posted looking for some labourers and as it turns out we are them. To catch the 7am ferry from Horseshoe Bay we have to leave our house in East Vancouver at 5.30 and catch the 257 express from Downtown. This means it ain’t practical on a daily basis so we’ve been camping out in Ted & Heather’s backgarden, waking up to the ferociously loud dawn chorus and getting the water taxi from Snug Cove out to the site. Now I’ve worked on building sites in the UK but I promise you’ve never seen anything quite like this. A rich bloke called Kim has bought a plot of land on the side of the Island that isn’t accessible by car, there only two ways to reach it. The water taxi, which docks at the property’s quay, about 80 feet (or around 100 steep wooden steps) below the house itself. The other way is through the woods, full of massive pines and firs, and along a cliff path so narrow there are ropes tied along it to hang on to with a massive drop on one side. The house itself is massive, made of wood and the view is of the the Pacific ocean and Vancouver Island. Must start buying lottery tickets.

Em’s unleashed a formidable new talent for pointing, essentially tarting up walls with rocks embedded in it while I have been putting up wire mesh and plastering cement scratch plates on the side of the house. And doing a lot of old fashioned picking-up-heavy-objects-and-putting-them-down-in-different-places (usually places that are much higher up than the original pick points) as well. We’re now in the perfect position for doing crime since we’ve been using a lot of cement and the corrosive properties of that substance is great for removing your fingerprints. I’ve gone pink while Em is browning nicely. We’ve got to move out of our splendid house in July and August since George, our landlord and an artist, is back from New York for a show so we’re looking for a couple of months work either on the Island or in the interior with accommodation thrown in. In the meantime we’ll do owt for peanuts so Em’s been a receptionist and I’ve been in a film with Penelope Cruz and Ben Kingsley (pretty much every film you see set in New York seems to use Vancouver instead).

*incidentally and sort of unrelatedly I suppose, I was approached by a middle aged lady the other day who wanted me to show her how to put on a condom. So, using my fingers, I did. ‘Thank you’ she said, and wandered off. Odd.

Sophie's Cosmic Cafe

Right, it's Emma this time, to tell you about my triumph in the wonderful Sophie's Cosmic Cafe. Jan is a Sunday Lunch addict and Canada has its own version of the English classic in the form of Sunday Brunch. As a special treat, we went over to Kitsilano to Sophie's, where we'd had a lovely brunch on our honeymoon last year. The menu mainly consists of the many things you can do with eggs, but my, what a lot of things you can do! I plumped for Eggs Benedict, whilst Jan went for some other egg-y dish. And huge lumps of potato. And bread. And hot spicy sauce. Yum. There's an awful lot of food between us and we are suffering by the time the plates are clean. Jan pops out for a post-prandial fag, leaving Em on her own with the Sunday paper.
Whilst Jan is outside, the eponymous Sophie appears and asks the entire diner for quiet - it's Sunday quiz time. Not that Jan and Emma noticed, but that morning it had been the Vancouver Marathon and so the quiz was based around this. The first question was "What was the distance of the original Vancouver marathon?" Emma, with a complete guess at 26km, gets it bang on and is rewarded with a chocolate ice-cream sundae as a prize - hurray!

Jan then walks back into the restaurant after having missed Emma's triumph completely. Ooops.

Emma and Jan are feeling very very full but there's still a prize sundae to eat, which appears just as Jan nips out for yet another fag. His timing today is somewhat off. The photos below should tell the story.



Emma and Jan then wander off for the rest of the day's fun, a few pounds heavier but with grins on their faces.

Now, the classic stereotype of the Canadian may involve large trees, checked flannel shirts and the Monty Python team finding things to rhyme with OK but Vancouver is a different kettle of poissin.
The Arctic Monkeys were in town yesterday and we caught up with Geoff, the manager, for a beer in the afternoon. Nice to see a friendly, familiar face out of context. The show in the evening was fantastic, I hadn't seen the band since October 2005 at The Plug and they've put on some serious muscle musically. The crowd did what crowds usually seem to do at their shows. Anyway, we popped backstage to say hello with our new chums Geoff and Silvana and left with with some rider gifts including a bottle of Canadian Red Wine from the Tinhorn Creek vineyards. I will just copy the blurb on the back of the bottle and leave you to draw your own conclusions.
"If this wine were human, it would tip-toe up behind friends and give it a start. It would be just as happy barefoot as in Italian leather. It would fill every room in its home with yellow roses - and black and white photographs. At the bookstore it would comb every aisle.
This wine isn't human. But you are. So enjoy it with chicken, turkey or pork. And be sure to fill your home - and your glass - with what you love."

Hello folks. Here's our blog. It was going to be a diary, minutely recording our doings, but that would have bored the tits off all of you. So, here are some lumps from our adventure. So far the defining moments our time in Vancouver have been the moments when we’ve ascended, rapidly.

Split Level City

Everyone says they want to live by the sea. I’m sure there are pasty, undernourished Vancouverites who dream of moving to Vladivostock or Sheffield but that wet stuff is a killer. It’s even better when the bottom of those seas rise up to become the living quarters and continue upwards to thousands of rocky feet. Mountains and oceans are a damn plucky combination.

We got fortunate with the weather the first few days we were here. The first Friday lucked up a little golden, spring-y and a little fresh. You can’t see the mountains at all here when the weather is shit, but when it shines those buggers glow, snow and all.

Friday 20^th May: 1pm: We take the sea bus, the moderately sized ferry, mercifully song free, across to North Vancouver, nip round Lonsdale Quay and buy food. Across the bay Downtown Vancouver is all glassy and tall; impressive but brittle. 45 minutes later we are kneedeep in snow. I’m not sure how she does it, it may just be love, but a short bus ride at an interestingly vertical angle takes us to the cablecar base somewhere on Grouse Mountain.

“You’ll like it,” she says, in a dimply lady way, knowing full well a stand on a kitchen chair brings me out in pale terror.

This bloody woman is the A-Team to my B.A.Barracus. Held up on cables which look like the veins on thin men’s arms who’ve done a little weightlifting with just a touch of supplements, a sodding great glass shopping basket swings up to 3720 feet, out of the fake sultriness of the spring, over the thick green pines and into the Alps. This is just one of Emma’s many ideas. I’m not keen on heights but it was a good one.

There are moments in life of sheer, surprised joy and this was one of them, the pair of us gobstruck and enervated by the altitude, enjoying trudging through the unexpected winter we’d just found. Leaning over the balcony, immediately below us is the man-made and vast, but normalised by sheer height, Capilano Dam, beyond that, filling the eyes, is Vancouver stretched out like a dissected city, beyond that and to the West is Vancouver Island, to the left of that and stretching south is America. Who could get bored of this except for those who only know this?

Friday 27^th May: 11pm: A small bar in Gastown with the Canucks flicking and thumping their way round an ice rink. It’s busy and we can’t see the big screen and struggle to pick up the little points of interest on the tiny screen above the bar. We fancy food, and some kind of antidote to the heavy, chippy, meaty Canadian food we’ve been filling up on since we arrived. Outside, and Em spies the rich pinky glow to the west, a sunset, a right proper sunset. A drift down to Canada Place but the big buildings just get in the way. Taxi!

English Bay is like a broad polite introduction to Stanley Park on the map and is somehow English, but a Riviera English, wide and safe with the sun sinking slowly, not like the Cape South African version which legs it into the sea without so much as a goodbye. An arm-in-arm promenade is not so much in order but called for. Good eats in a Greek restaurant and warm with wine Robson Street is headed up. Robson is like the central strip on the sea-surrounded lump that is Downtown. Around half way up that street Em points directly up. Bim! 42 floors in twenty seconds and we enter the revolving Cloud 9 restaurant at the top of the Empire Landmark hotel. If it was at ground level it would be a cheesy overpriced bar but at [at least] a million feet directly above our peers it is a noble, slowly turning moment of regality for the Kings and Queens that we truly are. Whiskeys and White Russians as we spin so sedately we’re unsure which way we’re moving but at least we know we are in Bladerunner.

It’s that thing with cities; they’re so crammed with everything bad and good in turn but stick on a few high altitude fairy lights and stand above it all and you want to weep with joy.

Next!