Category: Hobbies

Most days, I bike around the stanley park seawall. Some days, I stop to take photos of the remarkable scenery. Other days I take photos of graffiti on train cars. Some days, ok most days, I do multiple loops around the park.

When the weather is sketchy, I’ll take my commuter bike called Ada. On bright sunny days, I’ll usually take my fancy Pinarello racing bike.

I’ve seen seals, otters, coyotes, goslings, ducklings, and a marmot/ferret. One day I even saw a whale. (oddly enough, a few days after writing this draft post, I saw another whale)

The path is populated by cyclists, rollerbladers, walkers, joggers, photographers, readers and fishers. Approximately one third of the people I see are regulars, that I see more than once per week. There is one woman I’ve seen a couple of times who likes to yell at me that I should be on the road, not the bike path. I try not to take it personally.

Sometimes I take the road, but I do prefer the path, as it’s right on the ocean.

I feel a titch disingenuous writing about riding in Stanley Park without discussing my Strava Local Legend situation. Still, I’m going to save that for another post.

This morning, Steph and I snuck away for an morning hike up in Lynn Headwaters Regional Park. We’re both pretty sure neither of us had been there before, but it was splendid.

Most of the loop is two parallel trails, one that follows the Lynn Creeks east bank. The other trail is still on the east side but is further east, at a higher elevation, and almost out of ear shot of the creek.

Apparently the usual way (more interesting way?) to do the loop is to start out on the trail further away from the creek. This trail starts with a fairly steep section, but is then fairly flat up to the intersection where you can return to the parking lot via the trail running beside the creek.

The full loop that we did was listed as 8 km and recommended allowing 4 hours. We thought it was more like 9 km, and we were back in a bit under three hours. (YMMV as they say)

If you don’t feel like doing the full 8km, there is a second link between the two trails about halfway along. (This will all be obvious when you see the map.)

There are also more challenging trails heading off in a few different directions, but we didn’t investigate them. This is also a great place for dog owners, or anyone else who enjoys meeting dogs on the trail. (Dogs on hiking trails always seem to be their happy place, I reckon.)

I quite enjoy taking photos of flowers. In the beginning, I was using extension tubes on a film SLR, to take extreme closeups. (self reminder to digitize some of my early macro photos.)

These days, I’m much less ambitious, but I’m still always on the lookout for beautiful light falling on interesting colourful flowers. Irises are my favourite flowers, so I’m enjoying the fact that we are currently smack dab in the middle of Iris season.

Here are a couple of Iris photos I took today.

Two years ago, approximately, I was browsing drawing and sketching books at the lib. I picked up and checked out one that described a form of doodling called zentangles. I started following the exercises in the book. It was one part ceremony. (eg. it suggested you should feel gratitude for the paper, and your pens and pencils), one part rigorous rules, and one part ‘go with the flow’.

So far the ceremony parts haven’t really stuck, however, I really enjoy the balance between ‘go with the flow’ and process. It seems to have the right amount of random for me. I have recently found the discipline to do them on a regular basis. I’m not prepared to say they are meditative, however I do quite enjoy the ritual of them.