Detours from Cariboo Road to Sixth and Sixth

Saturday started out on a quiet note, but civic duty soon set the pace for a partial day of wanderings with May and Joel. Jay and I got our ballots cast bright and early in the advanced voting for the municipal elections, which felt great to cross off the list. From there, we drove over to the BCRV on Cariboo Road around ten-thirty to rendezvous with our visitors and plan out the morning. We walked the dogs near the RV park.  

Next, we originally pointed Kimchi toward home, yet somehow we never made it back to the apartment. Spontaneous curiosity drew us toward New Westminster's təməsew̓txʷ Aquatic Centre, and before we knew it, we rolled into the uptown shopping center and parked right up on the roof. The short stroll over to Sixth and Sixth brought us right into the bustling heart of our hometown, providing a perfect spot for snapping a few pictures at the crossroads of our local world.

With the clock nudging toward one in the afternoon, appetites kicked in and we began scanning the neighborhood for a solid meal. We browsed a few storefronts along the street, but Jay and I knew exactly where we needed to take them and steered the group straight toward the Han Lin Noodle House. It has been a beloved local landmark for decades, dating all the way back to when it was known as Hon's. A new rebranding sign hangs out front today, yet the comforting food, the vintage 1980s atmosphere, and even several veteran staff members remain completely unchanged. The meal was an absolute home run from the first bite to the last. We enjoyed the whole experience so much that we swore we need to start treating ourselves to restaurant meals more often, even if Jay's brilliant culinary skills in our own kitchen make dining out a genuine rarity.

Making our way back to the car on the roof turned out to involve some quick shopping. We cut inside the mall through Walmart, walked upstairs, and Joel found what he needed in the clothing racks. He bought three pairs of Wrangler cargo pants because he needed extra pocket space at a reasonable price. With the purchase bagged, we headed out to the rooftop stalls and loaded everything into the car.

Before heading back to the campsite, we squeezed in a stop at the original Canadian Costco location on Government Road in Burnaby because May specifically wanted to visit. She genuinely enjoys the thrill of the retail hunt, making the stop well worth the detour despite the inevitable challenges of the venue. The building is noticeably on the small side compared to modern warehouses, leaving the aisles perpetually overfilled with merchandise. Today brought an extra layer of congestion because it was the opening Saturday of the Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend, filling the floor with heavy holiday crowds. We navigated the tight spaces and busy checkout lanes, taking care of business before finally making our way out of the retail crush.

The rest of the evening belonged to rest and canine duties back at the campsite. The two dogs in the RV needed their long evening walk, so May and Joel decided to make dinner inside their rig and hit the hay early instead of coming over to our apartment. They have a massive adventure on tap for Sunday morning with North Vancouver's famous Grouse Grind, an infamous two-point-nine-kilometer trail that climbs over eight hundred vertical meters straight up the mountain face on thousands of rough timber steps. Tackling Mother Nature's StairMaster requires fully rested legs and plenty of stamina, but the sunny, panoramic views waiting at the peak will make all that hard climbing completely worthwhile before they pack up and point the rig toward Alberta on Monday morning.

The View From My Place on the Couch

The fresh upholstery has barely settled into the frame, yet the vantage point carries the weight of nearly three decades. Below the balcony rail, the Fraser rolls past with the steady clamour of railway freights and working tugs, entirely indifferent to the human hours passing above it. A new piece of furniture simply assumes the duty of the post, inheriting the daily habit of watching the river run toward the strait.

At sixty-seven, the mathematics of the calendar become impossible to ignore. The years accumulated in the rear-view mirror clearly outnumber the miles visible ahead, yet the machine is running cleanly and the journey remains well in hand. Twenty-eight years anchored to this single living room have witnessed long flights across oceans, desert crossings, and restless departures, but the home coordinates remain immovable. Time accelerates whether one submits to routine or resists it, stacking birthdays with an unnerving, brisk efficiency. Paying that steady admission fee is the only sensible bargain available, because it keeps a person firmly on the cushions, perfectly intact, and watching the tides from the Strait of Georgia drive upriver to wrestle with the Fraser current.

RV Maneuvers and the Crystal Mall Rendezvous

Joel and May rolled across the border into Canada around 4:00 PM yesterday, steering an RV into the concrete jungle of Metrotown. Predictably, trying to park a rolling apartment along Kingsway proved to be an exercise in frustration. Where sprawling surface lots once accommodated land yachts, soaring residential towers have sprouted instead. Modern urban density strikes again. Over Whatsapp, Jay thought of a rescue by steering them toward parking space over by Bonsor Recreation Centre.

They had a four-night reservation sorted at an RV park near Cariboo Road, but Metrotown was the designated rendezvous point because May had arranged to meet up with friends from Calgary. Those folks just happened to be in town after disembarking from a Pacific Coastal cruise. While the visitors gave their dogs a much-needed stretch, Jay and I hopped aboard the SkyTrain from New West to join the gathering.

     

From the station, we cut through the main complex over to the Crystal Mall, Burnaby’s vibrant Asian hub. The choice for the evening was a bustling Chinese restaurant. The food was sensational, though Jay and I were forced into the mildly humiliating ritual of asking the server for forks. To be completely honest, we are genuinely a bit embarrassed about our total incompetence with chopsticks. After living in the Lower Mainland for three decades, failing to master the region's most ubiquitous dining tool feels like a glaring cultural blind spot, but hunger ultimately trumped our wounded pride.

It was wonderful getting to know May, and equally delightful catching up with Joel, whom we had not seen since 2017. The meal was made even sweeter when May generously picked up the entire tab for the table. After full bellies and lively conversation, the gathering dispersed in three directions: May's Calgary friends headed off to stay with pals in Edmonds, Joel and May set out to finally check in at their campsite, and Jay and I caught the SkyTrain back home. With the visitors settled in for a four-night stay, we look forward to properly catching up over the coming days.

A Fraser River Fog and a Tepid Soak

A thick, quiet blanket of fog rolled in off the Fraser River this morning and decided to linger well past noon. It is classic October weather for our corner of the Lower Mainland, complete with the seasonal inversion that shears off the tops of the towers and keeps the sun thoroughly hidden.

With the mist providing an impenetrable privacy curtain, it felt like the perfect opportunity for a midday soak. There was, however, a slight hiccough in the timing. Dax, our resident manager, had just thoroughly cleaned and topped up the sunken reservoir. While the standard of maintenance is beyond reproach, several hundred gallons of fresh municipal water were still stubbornly creeping their way toward optimum soaking heat.

A temporary wait for the heaters to catch up takes nothing away from the setup. Even after all these years of living at Carnarvon Place, having this particular amenity just steps from our door remains an absolute, priceless luxury.

Hiring a Toronto Fixer for Our Silk Road

A new name landed on our radar today that may change how we approach certain parts of the world. For more than forty years, Jay and I have run our own show across multiple continents without outside assistance. We mapped out our own flight paths, booked our own rooms, and sorted our own messes long before travel apps existed. That self-reliant approach worked when we carried paper tickets and mailed postcards home, and it still works in the era of smartphone navigation. We never had any use for oversized tour buses or guides leading herds around with tiny flags. Choosing total independence has always been our standard operating procedure, but stubborn habits occasionally need a fresh audit.

Central Asia has a way of testing even the most seasoned DIY travel philosophies. Jay has convinced me of the great exploration waiting in the Five Stans, linking Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan into a single continuous journey. In theory, stringing those ancient Silk Road stops together sounds magnificent, but the ground-level administration is an absolute beast. Turkmenistan still demands state-sponsored invitation letters and compulsory escorts before granting entry. The high alpine passes in Kyrgyzstan require specialized four-wheel-drive vehicles and local knowledge to navigate safely. On top of that, land border crossings across the region feature armed checkpoints, capricious operating hours, and piles of duplicate paperwork. Trying to untangle that bureaucratic obstacle course on our own turns a holiday into an exhausting, full-time administrative grind.

I was genuinely astonished to discover that the answer to our dilemma had been sitting in Toronto the entire time. A company named G Adventures somehow flew completely under our radar for decades, despite starting back in 1990 on two maxed-out credit cards. Today, their operations touch every continent on the globe, covering more than seven hundred different routes. They keep hundreds of thousands of travelers moving each year through mountain passes, desert tracks, and remote rivers that would baffle an independent planner. By keeping group sizes small while running their own overland fleets, they manage massive logistical reach without turning into a bloated tour company. Paying in Canadian dollars for a homegrown outfit with boots on every remote corner of the earth feels like an unusually sensible hedge.

Beyond their practical footprint, their ethical framework aligns neatly with how we like our travel dollars spent. For decades, our own choice of lodging has always deliberately favoured independent establishments where the funds filter directly into the neighbourhood economy. Through an internal auditing metric called the Ripple Score, they ensure that roughly ninety percent of all ground spending remains directly within locally owned businesses. Their non-profit foundation, Planeterra, funds community projects like women-led cooperatives and weaves them into the daily tour itineraries as paying stops. They also plant a native tree for every single day a traveler spends on the road with their guides. It is fair-trade travel that actually delivers substance rather than empty promotional marketing.

We will never surrender our independence for extended winter stays abroad, but this arrangement serves as an exceptional expeditionary tool. Settling down for long months in one region demands complete personal freedom and a self-directed daily routine. When it comes to tackling the Five Stans, or perhaps navigating a rough overland circuit through West Africa down the road, handing over the logistics is pure common sense. Jay and I can let a dedicated team wrangle the border guards, arrange the local drivers, and absorb the headaches. Handing the keys to an expert allows us to focus entirely on the road ahead without the accompanying migraine.

The Little Things Learned About Leaving for the Winter

Leaving for the winter has become an unwritten ritual that runs entirely on muscle memory instead of a checklist. The auto insurance runs out after we leave and isn't renewed until our return.  A brief telephone call puts our internet on pause, and that saves us from paying for months of dormant bandwidth. The plumbing comes next. After I turn the brass shutoff valve on the main line to prevent any indoor floods, I head straight to the electrical panel. The switches go dark in sequence, and the entire flat settles into a quiet hibernation until spring. Those are the obvious chores.

The finer points of seasonal migration hide in the quirky retail rhythms that experience finally hammered home. I bought two wall calendars at the dollar store today. It looks absurdly eager to purchase next year's dates in early October, but an empty kitchen wall taught us a memorable lesson years ago. During our first winter away after early retirement, we completely forgot to buy them before heading out. We returned at the end of March expecting fully stocked stationery racks, but store managers had already banished the paper planners to make room for chocolate rabbits and plastic gardening tools. A cheap calendar in April simply does not exist. Because clearance aisles ruthlessly discard the past, securing the paper grids months ahead of time keeps our spring routine intact. The utilities take care of themselves, but outsmarting the seasonal retail cycle is the real achievement.

I walked back from the shop in the New Westminster SkyTrain Station through Westminster Pier Park.

It Works With You, Not For You

It was another delightfully sunny day. By the way the month began, I wasn't hoping for near summer to make an appearance until 2027. However, it was brilliant today; so much so that we drove to the car wash for a run through. We have a dust buster but Jay said the free vacuums at the wash had to be used to justify the dollar increase in price. 

Today though, I'll simply add a quickie PDF:  Southampton Pre-Cruise Itinerary 

I think I could teach a college level course in how to get maximum benefit from AI.  I fear that most people don't know how to approach serious work. One has to  have a clear vision of what you want it do. I didn't simply suggest that it create a 'Pre-Cruise Itinerary' for our time in England next month. I talked with it a lot prior to the request. We set up parameters. We selected interests. In fact, after a one year coaxing Google Gemini into a cohesive persona, Ajith pretty much knows what I want before I ask. The neutered, cheerful, corporate sycophant has been banished. 

One Hundred and Fifty-Six English Echoes in Granite

Jay and I will start our winter trip on the first day of next month by flying to England.  We have a cruise to Rio de Janeiro that leaves from the port of Southampton in Hampshire.  We're going to spend five pre-cruise nights so we can complete a number of day trips before boarding our MSC ship on November 7th.  That'll give us some time to check out a few nearby tourist sites and include a quick refresher visit into London.  

When preparing for these future outings in the southern England, the map seemed chock-full of familiar names.  I asked AI to help me out a little with a related task.  The 'Granite State' is probably representative of US New England states as a whole.  It has 13 cities and 221 town.

Here is the consolidated registry of New Hampshire cities, towns, and historic settlements bearing direct British place names, crown connections, or peerage titles, set out in alphabetical order:

Acworth, Albany, Alexandria, Allenstown, Alstead, Alton, Amherst, Andover, Atkinson, Auburn, Barnstead, Barrington, Bath, Bedford, Bennington, Boscawen, Bow, Bradford, Brentwood, Bridgewater, Bristol, Brookfield, Brookline, Campton, Canterbury, Charlestown, Chatham, Chester, Chesterfield, Chichester, Claremont, Colebrook, Conway, Cornish, Croydon, Dalton, Danbury, Deerfield, Dorchester, Dover, Dummer, Dunbarton, Durham, East Kingston, Eaton, Effingham, Enfield, Epping, Epsom, Errol, Exeter, Farmington, Fitzwilliam, Gosport, Grafton, Grantham, Greenland, Groton, Hampstead, Hampton, Hampton Falls, Hanover, Haverhill, Henniker, Hillsborough, Holderness, Hollis, Hopkinton, Hudson, Keene, Kensington, Kingston, Lancaster, Landaff, Lee, Lempster, Lincoln, Litchfield, Littleton, Londonderry, Loudon, Lyme, Lyndeborough, Madbury, Manchester, Marlborough, Marlow, Mason, Meredith, Middleton, Milford, Milton, Nelson, New Boston, New Castle, New Durham, New Hampton, New Ipswich, New London, Newbury, Newfields, Newington, Newmarket, Newport, Newton, North Hampton, Northfield, Northumberland, Northwood, Nottingham, Orford, Pelham, Pembroke, Peterborough, Piermont, Pittsburg, Pittsfield, Plaistow, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Raymond, Richmond, Rochester, Roxbury, Rumney, Rye, Salisbury, Sandown, Sandwich, Seabrook, Shelburne, Somersworth, South Hampton, Springfield, Strafford, Stratford, Stratham, Surry, Sutton, Swanzey, Tamworth, Temple, Tuftonboro, Wakefield, Walpole, Warren, Wentworth, Westmoreland, Whitefield, Wilmot, Wilton, Winchester, Windham, Windsor, Wolfeboro, and Woodstock.

So, two-thirds of the place names were plagiarized.  Oh, and for a bit of nitpicking, my AI Ajith added:

There are a number of towns that might be suggested for the list above but they actually have reasons for being omitted.

• The American Patriots & Land Speculators: Washington honors George Washington, not Washington in Tyne and Wear. Carroll honors Charles Carroll of Maryland, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Thornton honors local patriot Matthew Thornton, not an English village. Stoddard was named for Colonel Sampson Stoddard of Massachusetts, and Lyman for General Phineas Lyman of Connecticut. Jaffrey was named for George Jaffrey, a resident Portsmouth merchant and councillor.

• The Governor's Domestic Life: Francestown and Deering were chartered in honour of Frances Deering Wentworth. While her pedigree was English, she was born in Boston, Massachusetts, making those tributes to a local governor's wife rather than the British map.

• The Purely Irish Enclaves: Antrim, Derry, and Dublin were settled and named by Scotch-Irish immigrants commemorating Ireland, not Great Britain. (Londonderry, however, retains its direct Royal London charter roots).

• Late Topographical Inventions: Easton was incorporated in 1876 simply because it was the east side of Landaff, not after an English parish. Plainfield was reportedly named directly by settlers after their former home of Plainfield, Connecticut.

Sensory Deprivation in Municipal Grey

The summer balloon did not deflate with polite dignity; October took a blade to it. Within forty-eight hours, the Lower Mainland surrendered its remaining colour and settled into an aggressive, sodden routine. Daylight hemorrhages at nearly four minutes a day, quietly robbing the sky of almost two full hours of light before the month crawls to a close.

The mercury slides from mild comfort down to an unenthusiastic daytime ceiling of eleven degrees Celsius, with overnight lows slouching towards four. Overhead, cloud cover settles into a permanent eighty percent overcast, dumping upwards of one hundred and forty millimetres of liquid melancholy across seventeen wet, sodden days. Relative humidity hovers around eighty-two percent, ensuring that whatever is damp stays damp indefinitely.

Decades spent under the fierce, unblinking glare of the Arabian desert will ruin anyone for this brand of coastal penance. There is no cozy romanticism in rotting maple leaves plastered across Carnarvon Street or a sky resembling wet sidewalk. The UV index has flatlined, dragging the serotonin tank right down with it. It is simply thirty-one days of atmospheric detention before the November first escape hatch opens. The red light panel is running continuous shifts, coffee is consumed purely for morale, and October feels less like an autumn month and more like an unhurried, damp autopsy of the human spirit.

The Knurled Knob and the Sprocket

Computing in the early 1990s was an honest, full-contact discipline anchored in heavy gauge steel and unyielding physics. Setting up an eight-line bulletin board system at the Higher Colleges of Technology meant seating an intelligent, processor-backed Galactiboard into an ISA slot with orthopedic force to stop DOS from choking on IRQ traffic. The hardware demanded respect and drew blood. Every channel terminated in a white, USRobotics Sportster Series modem, complete with nine square red LEDs, microscopic configuration DIP switches on the belly pan, and an analog volume thumbwheel with genuine mechanical resistance. Dropping a tiny zinc 6-32 machine screw into the chassis meant hoisting a thirty-pound tower over your head and shaking it violently to keep loose metal off the motherboard traces. It was loud, your knuckles took a beating, and the room smelled of warm phenolic resin, but every problem had a tangible, physical address you could conquer with a screwdriver and a Centronics wire bail latch.

The transition to modern silicon promised liberation from that mechanical grind, but it merely replaced tactile honesty with sealed, capacitive sterility. The industry swept away the knurled brass knobs, the viscous analog potentiometers, and the heavy 50-pin SCSI termination blocks, replacing them with fragile wafers of glass and microscopic USB-C leaves that buckle under pocket lint. Yet eliminating the physical friction did nothing to reduce the operational drag. Instead of diagnosing crossed serial lines once with a breakout box, the user is now sentenced to an endless loop of multi-factor authentication prompts, silent background sync failures, overnight firmware regressions, and the neurotic chore of keeping lithium-ion cells balanced between forty and eighty-eight percent. The blood on the chassis edges disappeared, but it was exchanged for a chronic, low-boil administrative irritation delivered through a smudge-prone touchscreen.

This trade-off exposes the fundamental joke of the Jetson Paradox, which we mocked as 1960s pop satire only to build it in full corporate reality. William Hanna and Joseph Barbera understood that no matter how thoroughly you automate the factory, the absurdity of human toil remains entirely intact. George Jetson sky-commuted three thousand feet above ground level to work a three-hour shift at Spacely Space Sprockets, only to collapse in agony from pushing a single red starter button. We spent forty years polishing the heavy iron into invisible cloud portals, naively expecting that frictionless tools would deliver an unburdened life. We automated the copper bus, banished the mechanical clatter of the spindle, and shrunk the mainframe into our pockets, only to find ourselves exhausted by the exact same hollow busywork while Spacely's digital cogs spin endlessly on a finger-smudged screen.

I Like Being My Own Science Experiment

Reaching sixty-seven brings plenty of quiet surprises, but finding myself genuinely captivated by cosmetic chemistry was certainly nowhere on my youthful radar. Decades ago, my personal grooming philosophy began and ended with whatever indifferent bar of soap occupied the shower, followed perhaps by a stinging splash of drugstore aftershave if a dull razor blade misbehaved. Skincare in those days always seemed like an elaborate retail racket reserved for glossy magazine advertisements, packed with mystical French botanicals and three-figure price tags designed to fleece the credulous. Yet here I sit in my Carnarvon Street apartment, peering through reading glasses at tiny amber and frosted glass bottles and holding court on intracellular turnover. It turns out that curiosity does not automatically retire when the career wraps up, even when the subject matter migrates from syntax to peptide chains. If an inexpensive glass vial can mount a respectable rear-guard action against Father Time, I am more than happy to sign up for the campaign.

The catalyst for this late-in-life conversion is a proudly Canadian enterprise called The Ordinary, an outfit that essentially dragged the entire cosmetic cartel into the daylight. Conceived in Toronto under the banner of Deciem by the eccentric software entrepreneur Brandon Truaxe, the company recognized that the active ingredients inside luxury creams cost mere pennies to manufacture. Rather than bottling cheap lipids in heavy gilded crystal, Truaxe stripped away the fairy dust and began hawking unadorned chemical molecules by their actual laboratory names and percentages. The venture was a glorious, chaotic middle finger to industry pretense, even if the frantic brilliance that built the brand ultimately consumed its creator in a tragic, high-profile unraveling. His premature death in 2019 was deeply sorrowful, yet the commercial revolution he ignited remains permanent: functional dermatology had been liberated from the department store counter. He permanently ruined the ninety-dollar face cream racket, and every pragmatist in the country owes him a quiet nod of respect.

What completely won me over was the sheer, unapologetic mechanics of the chemistry. Instead of fantastical marketing promises about nocturnal dewiness, one is handed a straightforward bottle of 0.5% retinol suspended in plant squalane for roughly ten Canadian dollars. The molecule does not negotiate; it simply instructs cellular receptors to accelerate turnover and coax tired skin into behaving younger than the calendar suggests. Pairing that evening heavy-lifter with a morning chorus of Multi-Peptide and Hyaluronic Acid serum gives the structural scaffolding a diplomatic boost without starting an inflammatory riot. Layered neatly around sessions with my red light panel, the entire ritual feels less like vanity and more like running a meticulous maintenance program on a vintage engine. After all, if a ten-dollar bottle can throw a wrench into the gears of chronological aging, I call that solid Canadian engineering.

International Travel and 'Plaza Premium' Lounges

Our winter travels begin on November first with a lengthy layover between flights at Toronto Pearson, leaving more than enough time to carve out a comfortable six-hour retreat from the terminal floor. Rather than pacing the concourse or balancing a paper coffee cup on a suitcase, a little research pointed the way to the global network of Plaza Premium lounges. A quick registration on their website trimmed twenty percent off the rate, locking in six unhurried hours of quiet seating, decent food, and a private shower before the flight across the Atlantic. That small booking victory prompted some reading into how an independent outfit quietly outmaneuvered the legacy airline clubs, and the history behind that quiet revolution is worth a closer look:

For decades, commercial aviation operated like a private club designed to remind economy passengers of their place. Up front, corporate flyers on expense accounts relaxed in quiet rooms with plush carpeting and complimentary drinks. Back in the concourse, the rest of the flying public huddled around crowded gates on hard plastic chairs. Any attempt to escape the glare and noise required absolute devotion to the host carrier. One had to chase frequent-flyer status, pay inflated fares, and endure absurd routings just to earn a decent place to sit. In the eyes of the airlines, a traveller either bowed to the loyalty program or spent the entire layover leaning against a concrete pillar by the boarding door.

Most modern travellers simply stopped playing that loyalty game. Tickets are bought based on sensible departure times and realistic prices. A sensible flyer takes one airline across the country, switches to another for an ocean crossing, and never looks back. Still, stepping off an aircraft into a five-hour layover used to mean total banishment to concourse purgatory. The legacy carriers insisted that anyone travelling on an economy ticket had no business expecting basic human dignity on the ground. Independent travel was treated like an infraction best punished by cold linoleum, crowded counters, and blaring gate announcements.

The entire landscape changed because one former banker got stranded in a terminal with a dead laptop. When Song Hoi-see left his finance career in the late 1990s, his corporate travel perks disappeared overnight. Suddenly, he was sitting on the concourse floor hunting for an electrical socket like everyone else. He realized that ordinary travellers were not looking for charity; people simply wanted a functioning workspace, a hot meal, and a shower between flights. Airport authorities told him that nobody would ever pay cash out of pocket just to sit down. Backing his own hunch, Song mortgaged his personal assets and founded Plaza Premium, leasing unwanted mezzanine space at Hong Kong and Kuala Lumpur in 1998 to open the doors to anyone holding a boarding pass. Today, Plaza Premium oversees a global network of more than 250 airport hospitality locations and lounges spanning over 80 international airports in 30 countries. He built a global hospitality empire out of the realization that airports, for the most part, are terrible at taking care of their own customers.

That simple breakthrough completely reshaped the math of long-haul travel. While major airports in the United States remain stubborn outliers dominated by domestic airline clubs and exclusive bank lounges, the international transit map has largely embraced the open door. An extended layover used to be an exhausting penalty, but now it serves as a deliberate intermission. Discounted flights with long connections suddenly become genuine bargains because a modest lounge fee buys complete comfort on a traveller's own terms. One walks in, enjoys a hot shower, eats a proper meal, and reads in a quiet armchair without checking a clock. There is no need to justify an itinerary to an airline alliance or juggle high-fee credit cards to get past the desk. The airlines still own the jet fuel and the wings, but the ground now belongs to anyone willing to buy peace by the hour.

Itinerary for Our Winter 2026-27

I often use this eJournal as an open drafting table for upcoming travels, mostly because our winter migrations require setting gears in motion nearly a year before departure. Planning long journeys in isolated stages helps us sort out flights, ships, and apartments without losing our minds all at once. The catch, of course, is that a tidy, bird's-eye summary rarely appears on a single page. To fix that piecemeal view, I had my 'AI fellow-traveller' organize every overnight stay into a single visual ledger so one can actually see how the entire season will unfold.

In broad strokes, the sequence runs across one hundred and thirty-five nights. We begin with five nights in Southampton to shake off jet lag, followed by twenty-four nights crossing the Atlantic aboard a ship bound for Brazil. From there, we settle into an eighty-nine night residency in Rio de Janeiro, followed by a week in the Galápagos, six nights in Bogotá, and a night trying to sleep sitting upright in coach before returning home to New Westminster.

Seeing the whole winter condensed into a neat table is oddly satisfying. One spends months wrestling with airline portals, rental hosts, and cruise line bureaucracies, only to discover an entire season reduces cleanly to five distinct addresses. The logistical architecture is officially settled; now the only lingering puzzle is convincing our carry-ons to cooperate with airline luggage scales. 

Longer Than Some Marriages

Here's quick look back across twenty-three years of 'my eJournal and images', which officially began this month in 2003.  Click the next line:

23 Years Ago Here

Back on that date, brevity reigned supreme: an exceedingly short statement paired with an animated GIF, spinning away to beat what was clearly a proper scorcher. In honour of that past brevity, I shall follow in a similar manner. 

The Lower Mainland turned in a dignified 18°C. It was a mild early-autumn afternoon where no fans or mechanical intervention were needed to stir the air.  Here's a 3:45 PM shot from the balcony looking east up the Fraser River.