Living in Canada: Week of July 18 - hot cooler hotter

Another nice week in the Vancouver paradise. Today is the first time it rained in a LONG time - thunderstorm after sun and scorching hot at 28C all day. So it is almost welcome.
People always ask me why I don't go traveling now that I have all the time in the world but I am quite content with what we have here around us. And of course we need to save up for the trip to Sydney, Australia in September.

A long mostly hot week of training in K1.

Sunset at Deer Lake after finishing our second workout of the day on Thursday - the evenings are nice a calm!

We started it off with a Hike and finish today with a surfski race really surfing some waves.

July 19: Hiking the Elk-Thurston Trail near Chilliwack. There is lots of great hiking in the mountains south-east of Chilliwack. This one gets you up onto one of the first ridges out of the Fraser Valley with splendid views of the Fraser and Chilliwack Valleys. For a LOT more pictures see here http://picasaweb.google.com/krade1709/ThurstonMountainHike20July2009#

After about an hour climb through the trees you get to the top of the ridge with fantastic views over the Chilliwack River and the mountain ranges surrounding it

View back onto Elk Mountain with the Fraser Valley farmland in the background

And the other treat once you reach the open ridge - mountain meadows covered in wild flowers.

Steep slopes covered in flowers

Tiger Lilies - just one of the many wild flowers close-up

Not sure if we ever reach the top of Mount Thuston but this is about the point we turned around after 3hrs of hiking. The Lucky Four Mountains in the back.

And on the way back we were treated with some wild strawberries - although they are just starting out this high up at ~1500m

July 25: Howe Sound Downwind Race from Porteau Cove to Squamish (~16km). This area just north of Vancouver is known for its strong inflow winds due to the high mountains at the end of the inlet (leading to Whistler). The past 4 years the winds never really materialized for this race but this year was different. Jeff and I took our double surfskis up there and were joined by a lot of the Tuesday night regular racers. The most famous participant was Greg Barton, two time Olympic gold medalist for the US in sprint kayaking (K1/K2) in the late 80's. Since then he has founded a surfski company with another famous surfski paddler and has done surfski races all over the world. He just moved back to Washington and decided to check out the local race scene. Well he beat us all by a long shot. Only real competition he would have had - Ian Mackenzie - Canadian National Team member for marathon sprint - had to pull out early due to equipment problems. But this enabled Jeff and I to come in second. The first 2/3 of the race we had awesome waves to ride, the last 1/3 we made a small mistake and ended up with racing cross wind which was gusting at up to 28 knots - not so much fun. All in all a great race and we finished in a respectable time of 1hr14min.