Rose Brooks

Episode 905 – Two Days in September: The Best Laid Plans, But…

After spending a day reading (me) and continuing to work on curating photos (Ted), we began the month by attending a Songbird North concert featuring Stephen Fearing, Daryl Burgess, and Mercy Walker, hosted by Shari Ulrich.

It reminded us that it’s been too long since we had a folk music night.

The multi-musician format is something we’ve seen and experienced before, including at the iconic Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. Its success depends largely on the musicians and their stories and interactions; September 1st’s was a terrific lineup.

Yesterday our intent was to be up bright and early, on our way to the Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal.

On our recent trip to Vancouver Island we really became aware of just how many BC Ferries ply the waters of the Salish Sea. It inspired us to take more advantage of our free-ride seniors status.

While we were on the Spirit of British Columbia for our return journey last week, her sister ship Spirit of Vancouver Island crossed paths with us. Both were built in 1993/1994, each capable of carrying 358 cars and 2100 people (passengers and crew). The Spirit class are the largest of the BCferries, for now. Beginning in 2027, seven very slightly larger Summit class hybrid electric ferries will join the fleet.

I’d foolishly thought it would be easy to create a ferries-only full day on the water, flitting between the Southern Gulf Islands, but it turns out that a lot of the short-hop ferries only do twice daily commuter-hour runs. Besides that, even on some of the small islands there is more than one ferry port, each being dedicated to a specific route, and no easy way to get from one harbour to another without a car.

In the end, what I booked for us was a round trip spanning 5 hours of cruising, all on the Salish Eagle. The Salish Class ferries were the first in the BC Ferries fleet specifically built to use liquefied natural gas as a fuel, reducing air emissions. Many of the fleet’s older ships (the entire fleet is currently 39 strong) have been retrofitted to run on LNG, as was the case for the fleet’s oldest ship, the Queen of New Westminster, launched in 1964, on which we sailed to Victoria a week ago.

The Salish class ships have a particularly flashy paint job.

Photo from the BC Ferries website. The reason will soon become clear.

Our round trip route was to leave the mainland at Tsawwassen and make short stops on four different islands: at Sturdies Bay on Galiano Island, Village Bay on Mayne Island, and Otter Bay on Pender Island, before reaching our pivot point of Long Harbour on Salt Spring Island. The only harbour where we would exit the ship was on Salt Spring, and only long enough to go to the agent and verify our return tickets.

But we woke to rain. Not a lot of rain, but with a combined forecast of it continuing all day in combination with 70km/h (44mph) winds, it was the kind of forecast that would have meant spending our day inside the ferry, which was not at all what we wanted. We’d hoped for a day mostly on deck snapping photos.

Reluctantly, we cancelled our free tickets and went back to books and photos.

On the up side, I managed to finish two books in the two days: a short mystery that I really enjoyed and that introduced me to a new author, and a novel based on a true story from WWII. Each was short enough to read in a single day. Because I read on my iPad using Libby, when I’m ready to return a book it shows me how long it took to read it. For a typical novel not requiring intense concentration (or the ability to remember details of what I read, beyond whether I enjoyed it or not), it seems I read about 2 pages per minute so – between laundry, meal prep, and general daily tomfoolery – a book a day is not impossible when we’re not travelling.

The book’s blurb:
“Plenty of people consider Margaret Finch odd. Six-feet-tall and big-boned, she lives alone in a small cabin in the woods, drives a 20-year-old truck, and schedules her life so precisely you can tell the time and day of the week by the chore she is doing and what she is wearing. But the same attributes that cause her to be labeled eccentric — an obsessive attention to detail and the ability to organize almost anything – make her invaluable in her job as Research Assistant to a talented and charismatic botanist. It’s those very same qualities, however, that also turn Margaret into a target after a surprising death shakes the small university where she works.”
Germany, 1943: Twenty-six-year-old Rosa Sauer’s parents are gone, and her husband Gregor is far away, fighting on the front lines of World War Il. Impoverished and alone, she makes the fateful decision to leave war-torn Berlin to live with her in-laws in the countryside, thinking she’ll find refuge there. But one morning, the SS come to tell her she has been conscripted to be one of Hitler’s tasters: three times a day, she and nine other women go to his secret headquarters, the Wolf’s Lair, to eat his meals before he does.

So that’s it. Some successful planning, and some that was hopefully not a waste since we can try again. The ferries run year-round, so we just need to wait for a nice day after I’m back home in October.

Up Next: Packing

I’m off to Germany and Austria in 3 days for a 21-day self-guided tour with our #1 son. I’ll be writing, but there will be far fewer pictures than usual, since our phone batteries drain quickly when taking photos. Fair warning: those that I do end up sharing will definitely not be of the standard to which Ted has folks accustomed.

While I’m gone, Ted will be amusing himself with our grandkids (hopefully), more concerts (already booked), more photo curating (he’s just completed 2023), and lots of pizza (most definitely) until I get back.

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