BTDU

Today was all about moving north west up the Sunshine Coast to Gibsons (formerly known as Gibsons Landing) where we would be spending the next few days…

Rob had said that we needed to leave by 9.45 am, so after a classic Scottish/Canadian breakfast, we were all “locked and loaded” and set off…

…so we headed for the ferry terminal …

… but were a tad surprised by one of the shop fronts we passed en route…

…and subsequently discovered that liberal Canada had conditionally legalised Cannabis in 2018…

The 40 mins ferry crossing was flat calm and took us past Bowen Island, which we had last visited in 1996, causing fond memories to flood back…

…and once we were back on terra firma we made sure we got our essential provisions from the right shop…

…and the local church looked quite inviting too…

Upon arriving at Leith & Rob’s place it became immediately obvious why they had decided this was the one for them..

After our tour of the house and garden we settled in, got unpacked, had some lunch and then just chilled for a wee while, enjoying the serenity of this very calm-inducing home…

Later in the afternoon we all felt the need to stretch our legs, so L & R metamorphosed into our local tour guides, enabling us to get a wee taste of why Gibsons was awarded its accolade in 2009.

First off, we got a closer look at the local houses set, as they all are, in this temperate rainforest…

…and one of the locals had a clear interest in flightless birds, but there was no sign of Rod Hull anywhere…

…and although we were pretty sure this character was not a native species, we were in no doubt the ones on this warning most surely were…😉🇨🇦

Undeterred, we continued on, finding evidence of some other 4 legged friends who had been good at munching the lower sections of garden trees…

…and we soon found the family responsible, who seemed indifferent to our presence…

The next part of our leg-stretch took us down to the rightly named Secret Beach, where another reference to the furry locals greeted us…

… and seemed to upset one of the neighbours…

We descended some steep steps to the beach and enjoyed meeting the Pacific again, albeit from the East this time, now aware that this had been used as a film location for a long running Canadian comedy TV series…

…but there were no cameras about as we explored the driftwood covered pebbles and some of the overlooking homes…

We then turned back for home, testing our aerobic capacity up those steep steps…

…which Leith and I clearly won…😉🇨🇦

On the final part we took note of how their posties manage to deliver the mail so efficiently and how generous the community is to each other…

Once we’d had our tea and a good blether we spent the last 2 hours of the day relaxing over several rounds of card games.🃏🃏🃏🧵

Sometimes the simplest of pastimes are the best… ☺️