A short break at home and then another long flight back to the left coast. This time it’s the Canadian coast and about as far west as one can get on a direct flight from Toronto: Victoria on Vancouver Island. Victoria was only a pit stop on our journey up the coast. Rather than doing the five hour flight and three hour van journey in one day, we decided to break the trip up by staying in Victoria. This allowed us to watch Turkey upset Croatia in the Euro Cup in an unbelievably exciting soccer game; and to visit Al and family, who live about 40 minutes outside Victoria, for a barbeque.

Today we did the journey up the coast to Courtney. It should have been a beautiful drive, and there were certainly some beautiful “vistas”, but this area of the country has had so much unchecked growth in the past few years that man seems to have once again imposed himself on the environment to negative effect. I never get the feeling, around here, that I am inside the natural beauty, it always seems to be “over there”. What I do feel surrounded with are malls and crappy housing developments (A&W’s seem to be popular as well) and lots of clear cut spaces making room for human expansion. To truly enjoy the beauty of this spectacular island one has to run away from the growing population and journey inland, further north or to the far coast. There is so much beauty here, the problem is that there is also too much humanity.

We were all a little shocked at the size of Courtney. We were told that it is closing in on 300,000 people, which is very large considering how isolated it is. It seems like a decent place, but suffering from that same unchecked growth that I mentioned is affecting this whole part of the island. We have never played here so we were very pleased to have a sell-out tonight. More importantly we were very pleased to have such a great audience. Very loud, excited and supportive...very un-Canadian.

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An early morning call for a 90 minute drive to the ferry dock in Nanaimo. The day starts poorly with the discovery that a powerline has gone down, knocking out most of the cities electricity. No power means no espresso machines, no espresso machine means no morning coffee. A bad start to the day.

The ninety minute ferry ride across the Georgia Strait is always a pleasant experience (unless it’s storming and the water is rough) and today was no exception. A calm, refreshing passage. The gig tonight was part of the Vancouver Jazz Festival. We were supposed to be sharing a bill with Bill Frisell and his band. Bill was also going to sit in with us, which we were all very excited about. Unfortunately Bill has a family emergency and has cancelled all of his shows for the next couple of weeks. As a result we did two sets tonight to another very good and vocal audience. The theater was a huge space and despite the very good turnout, it could have felt very empty, but the audience helped us to bridge the space. A very fun show.