My friend came to visit again and we went some places. I’m uploading this in more of a photo-album-y way. At least half the pictures are his, I’m not tagging them this time.

First tourist place we went, on like the Friday after Christmas, was to Mystic Beach. We stopped at a café called Shirley Delicious on the way and got sandwiches and cake to-go and then ate them on the beach. There had been a windstorm earlier in the week (Tharash’s plane arrived one day ahead of the wind, thank goodness) so you can see some damage to the trees; there were a lot of trees fallen across the path, which did not bother dogs or small children but was a bit more trouble for us. It was a bit muddy (and I don’t currently have hiking boots) but I survived. Also you will notice in the photos that Tharash likes fungi.

One of these pictures has Tharash in it, but his grey-green coat helps him blend in. I turned around to look for him and I couldn’t see him until he moved. Can you spot him? (click for larger)

When we got back he informed me that the soles of his shoes were starting to come off, so I grabbed my heavy-duty industrial cosplay glue (barge cement) and we glued them back on.

In the next few days I made some crafting projects, because I have SO MANY. I like to make things, but I’m so busy I don’t set aside the time to do them anymore (because I’m “saving them until a special time to do them”, which ends up being never) and so they have rather built up. My parents gave me the bass guitar model for Christmas, but the others have been given to me over several years, and the LotR figures are promotional items from when the Hobbit movies came out. So… Metal Earth models, Bandai models, a soapstone carving, or HeroForge minis?

The HeroForge mini is of Elizabeth, my Dragon Age Grey Warden, and… that’s as far as I’ve gotten, I have not finished the paint job yet. (I have been playing too much Honkai Star Rail, but can you blame me, have you seen Mydei’s abs???)

We spent some time during the 2 weeks of visit walking around downtown, went shopping for fancy tea for him and a tea strainer for me (I have a tea ball but strainers are way easier to use?) and I needed new jeans and we got Liège waffles. We went to the museum which had an exhibit about Stonehenge, and this time the Old Town and the First Nations house were open, previously it was just the Natural History part. We ate out at a bunch of restaurants, including The Sticky Wicket, Garrick’s Head Pub, an Indian place near my place, Moxie’s, and take-out from Meet. When we weren’t doing that or going to my parents for dinner (besides Christmas Dinner With All the Trimmings (barbecued turkey, Brussels sprouts with prosciutto, maple-glazed sweet potatoes, bread dressing, green bean casserole, vinarterta (don’t ask why my non-Icelandic family has an Icelandic tradition for Christmas, I literally don’t know)) there was turkey soup and salmon Wellington, omnomnomnom) then Tharash took over my kitchen and I let him make whatever he felt like. What a nice guest. :3

Next visit was to Butchart Gardens, which we had skipped over on the previous two visits because Europe has its own manicured gardens but Europe does not have temperate rainforests (not like BC, anyway) – but with all the Christmas lights up, it was pretty great! My phone automatically picks up more light than his camera, and I can’t change the settings, so the brighter pictures are mine. We got some hazelnut hot chocolate halfway which was yummy. They did have sculptures of “The 12 Days of Christmas” displayed throughout the garden which I’m not afraid to scoff at, but anyway:

We also went to the local boardgame café to drink milkshakes and play D&D with a couple of my friends, and I discovered that I’m so out of practice with in-person D&D – when I play online, I sometimes wonder if it would be easier if I could see other people’s body language, so that we don’t talk over each other and so on. But actually, it’s harder, because I’m not very well practised in using eye-contact when I’m RPing, and it’s awkward!! I think I’d rather run the risk of talking over people now.

The last place we visited was Goldstream, and we spent a lot of time there going to just about every bit of the park! Except Tharash’s shoe sole started to fall off in earnest (all the parts that we didn’t glue gave way o_O) so we didn’t do the long hike from Goldstream Falls to Niagara Falls (really, naming people?), we just did the Goldstream Falls loop and then he changed back to running shoes when we went to the parking spot by the mouth of the river, and then went to the highway access point to Niagara Falls. It was the one sunny day of his visit and it couldn’t have been better.

A local concern is that there is a plan to widen the highway right beside the Goldstream River in order to put in a concrete barrier to prevent people from driving into each other – which sounds like a good idea, except that it will remove 800 trees from the riverbanks since the highway is right next to the river, destroying the ecosystem and making it more difficult for salmon to spawn. Like, whose idea was that??? There must be other safety measures that can be taken while not impacting what remains of the wildlife.

We had to get up at 5:00am in order to get him on the 7:00am ferry in order to get him on a 1pm flight out of Vancouver without being pressed for time at any stage of the journey, so he took these pictures from the ferry:

He sent me a message when he got back: “How you can tell you’re on a French airplane: when asking for wine with dinner, the response is: which one?”