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Wet season means change in plans

Holiday plans rained out; editor puddles around at home.

It’s vacation time again for the editor - and not a moment too soon.

For the next two weeks, I will be here and there, looking for sunshine and anything awesome that I can take pictures of.

Tool Man and I were going to make our annual trek to Fort St. John for the long weekend in August, but the rain damage in the Pine Pass and to other areas along the way has forced us to sadly cancel our plans.

Almost without exception, whenever I tell someone that I’m heading “up to Fort St. John” for a visit, I’m met with sympathy. Apparently, if you aren’t heading to some exotic southern resort, it isn’t really a vacation.

But I think the Peace country is exotic. Forget the oilfields and pumpjacks and oilrig trucks all over the highway. There are also endless forests of aspen, a quiet and a stillness that most people can’t imagine, horizons full of grain fields beneath a blue sky, muledeer everywhere and moose grazing in the marshy areas - and anywhere else they please, even if it happens to be whether it’s in downtown Hudson’s Hope or across the street from Tool Man’s parents in Fort St. John where I watched a momma moose and her two babies devour a lilac bush in Jeanne Pryndik’s front yard... on the day we packed up and headed south.

And for all the times I’ve seen them, I never get tired of looking at the Northern Lights.

You are missing one of this life’s great gifts if you’ve never been north.

But I love travelling in Canada. I was born and raised as far south as you can get in Canada; I’ve dipped my toes in the Arctic, Atlantic and Pacific oceans, as well as most of the Great Lakes, and there is still much more of Canada I would like to see.

And one lifetime is just not enough time to see it all, let alone two weeks.

We’ll just have to explore southern BC this year and pick up where we left off next year with our northern friends and family.

Wendy Coomber is editor of the Ashcroft-Cache Creek Journal