Another Summer Like Day Leads To Two Hikes

Paulette was off to Victoria early on Tuesday morning to meet up with friends at the Cloth Castle Quilt Store.  They have some kind of a ‘quilting club’ that meets on the first Tuesday of each month.  Afterwards, they usually go for lunch so that meant I had the entire morning to myself – except for the muttzo’s of course. 

This is where most of those 20 bags of manure were used

After browsing around on my computer for a couple of hours, I headed out to our back yard to putter around for a bit.   Around noon, I got tired of that so I thought I’d take Molly and Rylie over to the Koksilah River for a walk even though I knew when Paulette got home from Victoria she’d be all gung-ho for a hike.  At least Koksilah didn’t involve a whole lot of hiking.  Basically, it’s just park the truck and follow a winding path down to the river.  All was going well until…………

“I’m sorry, Dad.  I didn’t mean to try and smash your nice new camera to smithereens.  I just had to get outside because I thought that nasty cat was in our front yard again and I just wanted to chase him out”!!

Thankfully, my Canon G15 camera is built like a small tank so it’s still in perfect condition after it was pulled from my hand, by Rylie, fell and skittered across our hard tile entrance floor. 

I was holding Molly and Rylie’s leashes in my right hand along with my camera while I opened the front door – big mistake on my part, I should know better! 

As soon as the door opened, Rylie bolted out at full-speed pulling her leash and the camera out of my hand and crashing to the floor!  I gingerly picked up the camera expecting to see a crack, dent or scrape – nada, it looked perfect.

After snapping off a dozen or so pictures and testing the telephoto lens and anything else I could think of, I determined there was no harm done.  I’ll just have to add this experience to Rylie’s long, long list of petty crimes and misdemeanors.  It brought back memories of time 3 years ago when Rylie chewed my Motorola Bluetooth Phone earpiece to bits.  She was only a puppy back then – but nothing has changed as she still must think her full name is Rylie, Nooooo!!!!

Koksilah River

It took us about 20 minutes to drive out to the Koksilah River Park and on the way we drove by the entrance to the Kinsol Trestle.  That’s another place we haven’t been back to this year so I’ll have to remember that one.  It was another summer like day here with sunshine and temperatures in the 70’s again.  This is the type of weather we normally don’t see until July.  We’ll take it though.

The park was extremely quiet with no one there at all other than us.  We took the stairs down and were soon standing on rocks overlooking the river below.  The Koksilah is a much smaller river than the Cowichan but it can really rumble along the canyon walls at certain times of the year too.

We sat on some rocks for a while just watching the river flow by before climbing back up the long staircase to where my truck was parked.  The last few thousand yards of the road to this park is gravel so my nice clean truck now has a thick coating of dust all over it.  We got back home at 2pm and not 10 minutes later Paulette arrived and, as expected, was all set on hiking up to the water tower on Cobble Hill Mountain.  So, off we went for another hike only this time a bit more strenuous.  By the time we got home, I was beat.

My favourite room for a late afternoon siesta after a long day has become the upstairs den we renovated just last summer.  It’s warm in the winter and cool in the summer as the room faces east so the sun doesn’t beat in the windows.  Since we moved the second Lazy Boy chair out of our 5’er and up into this den it is a very comfortable spot to rest up.  As soon as I sat down in the Lazy Boy, Molly and Rylie hopped on my lap, I tilted it back and we had a nice long nap.

The walk down to the river was easy – going back, not so much!

I had an email from fellow blogger Mary Tipton (Heart of Carrot) yesterday asking “how were you able to get round corners on your images?”.  I told her it was one of the nice advantages of using Live Writer to publish blogs as the image tools are far better than Blogger’s Editor.  However, it’s easy to round corners on images using Picasa as well.  I’ll show how in the next few days.

Have a great Wednesday, and thanks again for visiting.