Our final destination is Yellow Point

Our final destination is Yellow Point, back on the other side of the island. We have decided that the journey back across to one of the ferry ports from Tolfino is just too far to risk missing the boat. Sarah trawls the internet, and finds an apartment that is free for a couple of nights in a kind-of complex place. Not the sort of place that the Goodfellow family usually heads for, but there is a swimming pool, tennis court etc., and from the photos it does look beautiful.

The drive across the island takes rather an age – there are roadworks on the road across the mountains, and we stop for a break at a place advertising the biggest redwoods around.

They are truly huge, and the kids clamber around on one that has fallen over, and pose for photos.
We arrive at Yellowpoint (finally) and the apartment is indeed very comfortable. It’s nice, I guess, after living wild for a week, and everyone is able to clean up. We go for a bit of a drive to find supplies, and stumble across and “English Pub”. Thoughts are very much turning to home by now, and we stop in for a pint. Alas, no children are allowed, although we find a lost one who seems to live there, who shows us how (not) to catch bullfrogs in a pond which is ridiculously full of them.

So we head back towards the apartment, armed now with a couple of cold tinnies. At this point SG has a good plan, and we park up at on the side of the road and trek down to a small beach which is clearly popular as a good place for a dip. There is someone swimming, and his dog, but it really is very cold and none of us venture in. It’s a great place to watch the sun go down. On the way back, we have fights with fir cones and, rather predictably, there are tears. A cracking shot from me, as it happens, but I get no credit for it.

The rest of our time here is fairly chilled – we have a good game of tennis, we go crabbing, we hunt for the famous purple starfish (these are not hard to find).

My thoughts turn finally to work, as I download the emails that I have not looked at for the past ten weeks. I intend to go through these on the plane on the way home. Reassuringly, I am really quite excited to hear how things have been going while I have been away. I wonder how my partner Rachel has been getting on with my clients…


Packing up is, predictably, as miserable as it ever was although at least we don’t need to do it again now. We faff about deciding whether to drive down to Victoria for an early boat, or stay up here for a later one, and eventually opt for the latter, to spare ourselves a drive. It means that things will be a little tight at the airport, but we are getting good at that bit now. In the end it all works like clockwork – we have a hearty breakfast, then join the queue for the boat, and there is a good kids’ playground to occupy people while I wander around eyeing up RVs that I am going to buy when I return to Blighty.

The boat is then easy, getting to the airport is easy, even getting on the plane poses no issues for us now. There is very much a sense that everyone wants to get home and it feels a bit as if we are treading water, just waiting for that to happen. We have had a fantastic time, and looking back on the previous trips that we have done, it really could have been six months that we have been away. I feel rejuvenated, we have had a great time as a family, and the kids have all grown up a lot. We simply must do this again one day…

An hour or so down the hill is Horseshoe Bay. We grab a Burger King on the way through (one of the great pleasures of travelling) and despite going up and down the motorway a few times in error eventually make it to the Ferry Terminal in good time before the departure. We have booked (well done Sarah G.) so have no trouble getting on the boat, and our Voyager takes pride of place right up the front. Once we have parked, we immediately charge up to the top deck, which is deserted throughout the journey, apart from us and a few smokers. As we find pretty soon, sensible people who have done the journey before take shelter below decks; only mad dogs and Englishmen brave the high winds up top.

We see no whales on our journey (another thing that Sarah is keen to see now that the Moose has been ticked off), although there are plenty of mysterious fins that appear and disappear, frustratingly, always just out of vision. The journey itself is only a couple of hours, and we arrive on Vancouver Island at Nanaimo late afternoon. Sarah has booked a stop-over hotel for the evening, because our place on Frank Island isn’t available until the next day. It’s cheap and cheerful, but we don’t brave the bar food and so go exploring around the harbour. Soon enough we find a Thai restaurant which serves us noodles and glasses of milk in vast quantities. We sit by an open window and freeze. The kids play in the ornamental pond.

The next day we explore Nanaimo harbour in the daylight. We find a decent café which serves us bagels and jam (Jemima is hooked on bagels) and look at the boats. Frankly, although Nanaimo puts itself out there as a tourist destination, you wouldn’t want to do much here other than pass through. One treat awaits, however; the local highland dancing club is putting on a display to commemorate something momentous that happened here a long time ago, so we watch their prancing up and down, accompanied by a burly ginger-haired piper whose genes tip their hat to a Scottish legacy.
He is a good piper. And then, the real highlight of the show – at 11am the piper is to light a huge cannon in front of which the girls have been dancing. Some Japanese teenagers have been watching, and one is selected to put the taper to the powder to light the cannon. This she does (albeit clutching a friend closely), amid much giggling and fingers in ears.
The cannon itself is indeed very loud, and the kids think the whole affair is great fun.

The Voyager awaits, so we drive off to the other side of the island after breakfast. The journey is complicated slightly by our need to buy supplies for the next three days, and also because if we arrive after 4pm the tide will be in and we will be cut off from our dwelling for the night. We pass through lakes, mountains, and forests of the biggest redwoods in the world. It’s all very spectacular.

We follow the instructions and arrive at the beach just short of Tolfino in time for the tide. There then follows one of the most impressive movements of supplies in the history of human endeavour – everyone carries something and everyone is carrying far more than they can comfortably manage. Eliza and Jemima between them carry the new green bag; Sarah is carrying a couple of rucsacs, and Monty some food. I carry the North Face red clothes bag on my back, and also booze supplies in a rapidly failing box, alternatively in front of me, on my back, and finally on my head. It is a long walk – well over a mile, and this becomes tiresome for everyone soon enough. But there are some nice waves to watch rolling in as we suffer.

Eventually we walk onto a long spit of sand extending away from the land with sea on either side. Long strands of kelp are washed up, like bullwhips. Monty thinks these are fun to jump on, because they have a floaty thing at one end which pops when you stand on it. Flocks of small birds skitter around, flying in waves as if connected or in sync somehow. I think these are sand pipers. They are so small that you can’t make them out until you get quite close, and their legs move too fast to see. We are told by an aged beech-comber that these wonderful birds have been quite rare recently, and she is pleased to see such a number this season.

And at the far end of this spit of sand is our island - Frank Island. And on the island is our house for the next three nights.
No plumbing, no mains power. An outside loo, an outside shower (which we don’t find for a day or so),
and just a few car batteries recharged by the sun to power a couple of small reading lights. The hut has been put together well, albeit in an amateur way, and is literally perched on a rock on its own 10 acre patch of land, invisible from the mainland, and facing out to sea. There is a small room in which the kids sleep, and a double bedroom upstairs on a kind of maisonette level, which also provides access out onto an outside area with a couple of seats from which you can watch the whales spouting a few hundred yards off the shore.
With binoculars, we can see humpbacks breaching every now and then. The first time we saw one, we couldn’t believe it, so we fished out the binos and spent long hard minutes looking into the sunset through them, hoping for a breach. It’s pretty much guaranteed that if you do this you will be looking in the wrong direction. The trick is to see one with the naked eye and then focus for the next 5 minutes or so on that place, in that hope that it pops up again. We reckoned that there were probably 4 or 5 different whales mucking about one evening. Sarah gets excited about going out on a boat to find them.
We drink too much white wine in the sun that evening, then rise late and throw together some breakfast.
We have bottled gas, but no running hot water so washing up involves warming water in pans. Slow, but we have plenty of time. We then decide to go and explore Tolfino, so make the long walk back to the beach and the car parked where we left it yesterday. The waves are not looking quite so strong today, so I begin to get itchy feet in case the swell drops off altogether. This puts surf rental at the top of our priorities, and I do this straight away while Sarah and the kids order breakfast in a café opposite the rental shop. Monty makes friends with the owners by climbing up the counter and pulling the whole thing down on top of him. Next door is one of Tolfino’s many activity centres offering bear-watching tours, whale-watching, speedboat rides, sea-kayaking etc. Sarah is getting excited about whale-watching, so we book a trip for lunchtime.

We have plenty of warm things with us, but it turns out that we have to don comedy suits anyway as protection against the cold and the spray.
They don’t have ones Monty’s size (as usual, we have had to be optimistic about his age when booking), so there is lots of rolling up of sleeves and trouser legs etc.

The trip itself is really very good – our guide is a local who clearly knows his whales and their habits, and we see Grey Whales (with very bad breath) and Humpbacks, both very close to the boat.

We also see sea otters, sea lions and gulls of various sorts in droves.

Being far out to sea also allows us to look back at Vancouver Island and its impressive topology.

Whale-watching is all very well, but I am by now almost beside myself at not having yet got into the sea. We go back to Frank Island and I get into the water. The sea is extremely cold and I now understand why everyone else is wearing full suits with socks, gloves and balaclavas. Fortunately the surf is good enough to keep me warm inside. I enjoy my 6’2 which is a bit shorter than I am used to (Costa Rica excepting).

The next day is spent chilling on the island. We go crabbing, fishing, scrambling; Sarah does art and crafts with the kids while I go in the water again. I could live here for quite a long time doing this.
Sarah less so, though, so the following day sees us once more in Tolfino, but this time sea kayaking. We go in pairs, with Jemima crewing with Mum; Monty with me, and Eliza with the guide. I have never seen so many star fish – they come in two shades, either purple or orange. We also see another otter, which is cool, and perhaps coolest of all – a dead shark which must be at least ten feet long. It is washed up on a sand bank in the middle of Tolfino sound, so we all disembark and have a good look at it. The guide has a leatherman with him so we pull a few teeth out for no reason. The kids make a sand castle.

We have supper in a local restaurant (Shelter), served by an Ozzie who gives me some advice on the best breaks while clearing up soft drinks spilt on him by the kids. Good food, good wine – this Tolfino place could be worth a return trip one day. The sun is set by the time we finish so it’s a romantic walk back to Frank Island across the beach in the fading light.

In fact, we do the same walk home again on our last night, only this time in complete darkness. The reason is that we attend the Tolfino lantern festival in the early evening, a cracking “do”, whereby all the kids around have made lanterns in which candles are lit, so that in the dusk light (and, later, complete darkness), the colours and shapes are lit up. The lanterns are hung in the trees and you walk along paths through the woods with the lanterns lighting your way. Very jolly, and there are various bands dispersed around the place providing accompanying music.

One more surf the next morning, and then it’s off to our final destination on the other side of the island – Yellowpoint.

We all go on a bear hunt

We arrive in Vancouver with nowhere to stay.
Text messages have been swapped with Ali Williamson, because Lisa has invited us to her family cabin in Whistler, but it turns out that she is already on the flight home so we have to think again. We have a hire car, one of those “Voyager” type things, which has automatic buttons to open the boot and the slidey doors at the side. You can imagine how well this goes down with the kids – there’ always someone ready to offer to open the doors for us, and we all know what a ghastly job that can be.

So we decide to drive through Vancouver and hammer it up to Whistler that same evening. The drive itself is probably two hours at the most, and gives Sarah time to organise somewhere for us to stay, on the hoof. I can’t remember how she does this, either by phone or on the web, but we arrive at some terrific and reasonably priced hotel (Pan Pacific Village Centre) with a suite about the size of our whole house. This would be a good place to spend a week skiing, but I guess the price probably goes up a bit then. We have gas fires in each room, a hoofing great living area, kitchen, and two enormous double beds, so we end up staying here for 2 nights in the end.

Whistler in the summer is a top fun – we rent bikes, we go climbing, we go shopping for gear (this is OK, this is not “normal shopping”), we eat sushi, and generally gad about the place. Biking was tremendous fun – Sarah, Jemima and Eliza had their own bikes, while Monty and I shared one with one of those tow things, and there are mountain bike tracks galore.
We spend almost an entire day riding around, stopping here and there for pranks and photos, getting lost and found, then back to Whistler for food and afternoon beer in the sun.




I go into one of my dreamy phases when I spy a downhill bike rental place. They kit you up, body armour and all, and send you up the skilifts to the top of a huge range of downhill runs ranging from beginner (blue) to psycho (red) ending up at insane (black). I have a look at some of these and no self-respecting almost 40 yr old would do anything other than blue. They have names like “Monkey Hands”, “Samurai Pizza Cat”, “Drop-in Clinic”, “The Test of Metal”, “GearJammer”, and “No Duff”. Looking at the kids who are doing the black runs, they are all teenagers or in their early 20s. I guess anyone older than this has had a bad fall and doesn’t do it anymore. I wish I was 20 again, but since I’m not, decide to give the downhill bike rental a miss. Haslemere friend Woody bought a downhill bike to do the MegAvalanche in Alpe D’Huez and came back with broken ribs and a story about someone he met who fell off and broke his leg on the first steep pitch, then someone ran over the other one and that broke too, putting him off-games for 6 months. Enthused by this, Woody went out and ebayed himself a new downhill bike, only to break his wrist on the first jump down at Rogate.

I decide to go out and do some cross-country instead.

So I wake up at 5am the next morning and take Sarah’s basic MTB out for a spin (mine still has a tow attached). I head for the Last Lake Loop, and rides in that area with more sensible names like “Captain Safety”. Given that I am unlikely to meet anyone else around at the time, I don’t want to risk too much although I do end up falling off a few times. There is “White Gold”, “Ho Chi Minh Trail” and many many others. New ones are being built all the time – cracking bits of single track with no long ups or downs, just rolling and winding. Eventually, it begins to get a bit lighter, and I see joggers and the odd dog-walker on the main trails between the MTB loops. I also see (or rather, hear) a chap coming from some way off. He is singing and ringing his bell. I assume that he is insane.

But shortly afterwards, I realised that he probably wasn’t insane. In fact, it might have been me who was short of a few. As I came roaring around one corner (my guidemap advised “descend the naturally technical foreplay trail back into the Lost Lake area”) I ran smack into a large Black Bear. Now I didn’t actually hit it, but it was damn close. I was riding extremely fast, and by the time I rammed my brakes on I was only 20 feet away. Now I’m as happy to see a Black Bear in the wild as the next man, but by the time I stopped I can only have been 5 or 6 feet away, so there was not much that I could do other than emit a rather pained groan as I glided nearer and nearer. But bizarrely (or perhaps this happens all the time to this bear) it didn’t seem bothered in the slightest. He was big fellow, no doubt about that, much much bigger than I thought they were, but this one was not aggressive in the slightest. He looked at me, and I looked away as you are supposed to do and started walking back up the trail the way I had come, and then he just strolled off into the brush. I watched him for a while, as long as I could from the trail, as he wandered through the brush, digging a bit here and there, grubbing there, making quite a racket as he went. Thank goodness I came across a gentle one.

After that, I was a little more circumspect about the speed at which I took the trails, which took some of the fun out of it frankly. I decided to head back home, although before doing so, resolved to find the start of the famous “Comfortably numb” 24km black run. I found this with no trouble, and went along it for a few hundred yards. It was technically very difficult – narrow, with many roots, and had really dark impenetrable brush on either side. After my bear experience, I decided that this trail was one to do with some company, so I turned back and headed home.

The team was only just getting up, having had a late one at a Sushi Bar the night before. We pack (again, this is getting painful), then head over to the climbing wall so the kids can get rid of a bit of energy. This proves a massive success. There is no one else there, so we are left to our own devices. Using the autobelay devices (I need one of these for the garden) the kids charge up and down the various routes for a couple of hours. Of course I am proud Dad, and maybe all kids can climb like cats at this age, but they really did do well.


We noted that during the evenings, this climbing centre does supervised sessions for families called “Climb and dine” whereby the kids go climbing and the adults go off and have dinner. Now that’s what I call clever thinking.

We then down the mountain in the Voyager towards the ferry station, and our last destination, Vancouver Island.

The Elusive Moose

We leave the Spotted Horse Ranch with heavy hearts. Driving away was difficult although my eyes were really only watering as a reaction to paying the end of week bill. I justify it to myself on the basis of having earned many BA miles, perhaps enough for a free branded highlighter pen.

Our destination is back south, and Salt Lake City. We fly from here up to Vancouver at around lunchtime on the following day, but in the meantime have planned to meet an old pal of mine, Jo Edwards, at a campsite somewhere near Alta, the ski resort. As is the way with Jo, who still has no mobile phone and refuses to give out her home phone number (to me at least), plans are somewhat sketchy, but we have arranged over email to meet at a camp site just down the road from Alta. We cannot book spaces of course, but in any event booking as a concept would contravene Jo’s rules.

The drive down to Salt Lake was reasonably featureless, although bear in mind the context of the last two months, so were this to have been our first drive of the holiday, we would have been gasping at the scenery. We have “experience fatigue”. Long straight roads really allowed me to let the old girl out a bit – we touched 75mph a few times which must have lowered the fuel consumption stats a little. As we approached Salt Lake, though, the scenery gets pretty stupendous again, and you feel rather like a participant in a video game, scorching along freeways between vertiginous mountains on either side (although not in an open top red car – no blond hair flowing out the back). Finally, Salt Lake itself, and some incompetent map-reading has us motoring through suburban estates, like Robin Williams in “RV” (recommended for laughs by the way). Finally, Sarah pulls herself together, and we head up to Cotton Wood canyon, where, amazingly, we find the campsite just as Jo promised. We don’t find Jo of course, and I think both of us have resigned ourselves to the likelihood that this will be a wild goose chase. There is a space, though, and we pay our money to a grumpy Grandpa in the entry cabin and tootle off to Bay 19.

It is while we are reversing into Bay 19 that Jo turns up, all bounce and blond hair. The kids are a little startled at first, they were too young to remember Jo when she last visited Moorside, but this doesn’t last and they are soon into the swing of it. Initially, Monty remains asleep in the back of the van, but after a while emerges bleary-eyed to meet his godmother for the first time.

There are only a couple of hours’ light left by now, but we decide to pile into Jo’s car (a Scooby-Doo; great choice) and we zoom off up the hill to Alta which both Jo and office manager James Getgood have recommended for a skiing holiday one day. It doesn’t look much without snow, but you can see that the off-piste here must be pretty awesome – lots of lifts up and few guided runs down – just make your own way through the cliffs. We head off-tarmac and up to the “trailhead”, deciding to walk a mile or so up to some lake or other. It’s pretty cold.

Rather bizarrely, we meet a couple of extremely drunk fellows who can barely walk, and are making “moose” faces at us, using their hands to mimic antlers. The kids don’t really understand, but we make “moose” faces back and everyone seems to think this is very funny. Suspicions begin to build as the next group that we meet, of Asian origin (in fact, probably Asian in every sense, because they speak no English), also make “moose” faces at us. The kids, now used to this apparent Mormon greeting method, return the moose faces and we play Frisbee with them for a few minutes. The Asians cannot play Frisbee, even though it is their device, but it is great fun retrieving the disc from far away places where they have thrown it.

We move on, and it is while returning moose faces at the third group of ramblers, this time a couple of sober and very serious male hikers who also put their fingers to their lips, that we realise that a cryptic message is being conveyed, namely that we are in the presence of MOOSE. There is a side-story here, which is Sarah Goodfellow’s complete inability to spot MOOSE wherever we come upon them. This started out when we visited Jackson Hole in January 2008 and everyone but Sarah saw MOOSE. It continued through Teton and Yellowstone this trip, and then at the Spotted Horse Ranch, where MOOSE roamed freely. Sarah continued to miss out on sightings, reliably and relentlessly. This was not lost on the kids, who spared no efforts in explaining what MOOSE looked like, how big and how amazing they were and so on. So now, with the prospect of a MOOSE sighting in the offing, we are all rather nervous that some bizarre circumstance should get in the way – perhaps an alien landing, or bizarre yachting accident will intervene. Sarah is even wearing a T shirt with a picture of a moose on. But this does not come to pass and suddenly there they are – two huge bull moose sitting grazing by the side of the path, with whacking great “racks” and whattles to match. We only have Jemima’s camera, with a fairly limited zoom, but still take plenty of photos, and Jo even manages to get the details of some professional looking geezer who is taking with a long lens, so we are sent “money shots” later on, by email (see below).

They really are very strange looking creatures, and the children have fun seeing how close they can get without the moose getting angry. And after that, we have “broken the seal”, or duck, or whatever affliction Sarah has, and we can’t stop seeing moose – moose are everywhere that we look, we can’t get away from them and by the end of our stroll we have given up pointing them out. This despite the fact that Jo has never seen moose anywhere near this trail, so the whole experience is thoroughly strange.

After some fun taking self-timer pictures of ourselves on a rock in the middle of a lake, which involves me (Hugh) having to leap about, with the camera falling over, my getting wet feet etc., we repair back down the hill and have a very pleasant dinner in a cosy ski lodge.
By now, the kids think Jo’s absolutely great – no rules, no taboo conversation topics, plenty of laughs and they spend much of their time with their mouths open. We have quite a bit of wine, and I think maybe one of the kids drives us home in the end.

Once home, we set about lighting the camp fire, and making marshmallow sandwiches using cheese biscuits and chocolate (these concoctions have a name, which I forget).
The kids think these are foul, in fact everyone does, but we make some for the grumpy Grandpa in the camp entry hut and Jo and Mima take him up a couple to cheer him up. He turns out to be quite jolly, by all accounts – Jo just reckons he couldn’t understand our accents.

After a final stick-whittling exercise (which given that we have spent 3 weeks doing this, ends, amazingly, in a “no injury” score), the kids retire exhausted at about 10, then Sarah shortly afterwards. Jo and I put the world to rights until after 1am. Terrific to catch up with Jo, and I think she enjoyed some English company for once.

The next day dawns a little wet, but we keep warm by burning everything – and I mean everything, with the sole exceptions of our kitchen knives, some tuna fish, and spare beer which Jo takes home. We burn paper plates, pasta, sugar, crisps, marshmallows, cheese, boxes, spare loo roll - even things that don’t burn, like empty cans, onions and jam (actually, onions burn in the middle like candles, then explode). It’s all quite cathartic, and not very “green” but super fun and it keeps the rain away. Jo amuses the kids in this way while we clean out the van in preparation for its return, and then we head for the drop-off point at Camping World.
We say goodbye to Jo once again, with promises swapped to keep in touch a little more often, and then we taxi to the airport, and our departure for a final destination, Vancouver.

The Snake River

Wednesday is a day off for the ranch staff, and most of us opted to go white water rafting for the day. Monty had to be “six” again – I think he is getting quite confused now. Eliza and Sarah took comedy photos. ;
We breakfasted in Jackson, and donned wetsuits for the team photo. It was lucky we didn’t bring our car –
A 20 minute drive got us to the put-in, and we split into rafts, with Goodfellows all together and Dad predictably in the driving seat up front.
One reason I needed a good view was that I had planned to descend the same river again the afternoon, only in a kayak. I had heard stories about the “Taco” and “Burrito” rapids on this stretch and wanted to get a good look at them before the afternoon trip.

Tom was our guide, a veteran rafter, who according to my guide in the afternoon was a bit of a legend in Jackson rafting circles. He had done a number of first descents in his time, across the globe, and was full of good stories about the river and its wildlife. MY favourite one was of a Dodge Van that is submerged somewhere along the river, after some folk reversed it down to the get-in so they could more easily take the raft off the roof, only left the handbrake off. The van duly rolled into the river, but didn’t sink because of the raft still on top. Finally, the whole setup got caught in a stopper and the raft finally pulled off, leaving the van free to sink into the depths of the river.
We all had a good time in the water.
Jemima and Monty took it in turns to ride up front,
and Sarah even rode one rapid (the biggest) in a particularly undignified position rodeo style right on the nose of the raft.
After lunch, the family went off to some hot springs up the valley,
; ; while I was dropped off at Hoback Junction to meet my kayak guide. He turned out to be a good guy, Jon Souter, now a kayak guide but once in the US team so I was in good hands. I had learned by now that because everyone in America tells you that they are completely brilliant at everything, it is the wrong place for modesty when they ask you how good you are. You need to really cook it up, or else you get stuck in some great fat boat which won’t ever turn over. I had followed my own thinking here, and Jon turned up with a snappy little boat for me, along with some lovely carbon fibre paddles which I fell in love with. He tested my Eskimo roll (deemed “solid”), and then we were off. Paddlers have different obsessions on the water, and mine is standing waves, so we headed for these, with Jon giving me tips along the way.

Again, technology has really moved on in the kayak field and with carbon fibre 30 degree offset paddles, and a very comfy seat I would have been happy paddling all day. Highlights were indeed the Taco and Burrito rapids, the Big Kahuna, the Lunchbox, and Ropes. Taco sits right next to Burrito and at this low water level was merely a big hole, even if one you wouldn’t want to go into. At higher water levels, Jon told me that the hole can be “terminal”. Burrito, on the other hand, was a big standing wave, quite tricky, but good fun from watching Jon and some others play around on it. I only got onto it once, not quite ever getting the entry point right, and I kept falling off the back. There was also quite a gnarly ledge below the rapid which I didn’t really fancy riding upside-down.

After that feature, there is some II and mellow III until a flat stretch known as gauging straits. Immediately after that are the 3 best rapids of the run. Big Kahuna is a big huge fast wave in the middle of the river. After my failure to get onto Burrito, we decided to run this straight, which was a good decision – big high waves and lots of chop. After that was Lunch Counter, which is apparently one of the best surfing waves. This one I did catch, much to Jon and my surprise, and I rode this for a while. It was while grinning at Jon, who was surfing next to me, that I flipped over. No time to see it happening, I just slammed upside down. A moment or so upside down, but then much to my surprise I managed to roll up again – a real confidence booster for my next trip up to Perth with Tom. This wave is apparently “downright huge” above 15,000 cfs and gets ridden by big wave surfers who fly in when conditions are right. Not quite sure what happens when you fall off it, but apparently noone’s died yet.

Then it was a couple of mellow II-III's until the last rapid, which is the longest but not hard at all, and one of the most fun, with multiple small waves to surf. There is a big house sized rock in the middle and that's the only thing you need to avoid. The get-out was directly after this rapid and I was reasonably pleased to see it – we had spent a good 3 hours on the water and I was ready for a beer.

The Spotted Horse Ranch

We drive down to Jackson. I have really had enough of driving the RV now and am sent up Snow Bird on an ancient mountain bike to calm down. I ask the rental dude how fast he has done the climb and he gives me a target of 35 minutes to aim for. Disappointingly even in this state of angst I have to stop 3 times and miss his mark by 5 minutes. He warns me that it is “really tough” and that I’d have a lot more fun if I take the bike a mile up the road, but I judge that my state of mind is just right for a challenge of this sort on this occasion so decide to go for it anyway. Unsurprisingly, cycling up a black run turns out to be rather an esoteric pursuit, and the kind of climb that has absolutely no let-up; just about as steep as you can manage all the way up to the top. It occurs to me, as I gradually calm down and the challenges of parenthood dissipate, that I could turn around before I get to the top, but the 35 minute target and having to admit to failure spur me on. Finally, I decide to give up, and stop to ask an amused dog walker how much farther is the top. He reports only another quarter of a mile, so I continue. Fantastic view from the top, and a great descent; when I return I find the team playing happily on swings and slides with some local kids. That’s better.

Little do I know that my loaned bike helmet is to be the last protective head gear we see during this holiday, despite spending a week horse-riding across territory that would have Chris Bonnington looking for his ropes. The received wisdom in Wyoming is that a simple cowboy hat is good enough to protect the head from any unintended contact with the ground (or rocks, tree branches etc.) and the availability or otherwise of what we in the UK call a “riding hat” is never brought up. Reassuringly, fishing gear is available to borrow however.
We arrive and are shown around the ranch by young Chelsea, who is quite the image of the Marillion song, but whom I never see again until it is time to pay at the end. Not quite sure what she does really. The ranch has a communal building including a dining room, bar and pool table, and then ten or so cabins spread around. Ours is apparently the original “historic” cabin, built some time in the 1970s I guess, and super-comfy with a roaring fire, 3 bedrooms, “Grandma” style porch with rocking chair, and decorated by various items nailed onto the walls which have you guessing what they are. We have dinner with other guests then reasonably early bed ready for the next day. Breakfast bell is 8am, and we all manage to attend, for the first and last time. The food is hearty – eggs in various forms we have never seen before, pancakes, bacon cooked in brown sugar and maple syrup, and lashings of coffee, which after Costa Rica Sarah and I are now fully dependent on before speech becomes possible. At 9 we line up for our first ride.
Sarah has written to the ranch to inform them of our respective abilities, and they are very good at matching horses to these templates. Monty has “Pay-check”; and on camp day, Elvis;
Eliza has “Pops”; Mima has “Leftie”,
Sarah has “Charlotte”
and I have “Whiskey”.
We stick with these all week, except for Mima who had a less forward-going mount on the very first ride; Sarah whose horse is bitten badly on the penultimate day; and Whiskey who I tire out one day by going wrangling. The first ride is as a family, led by guides Dakota and Wes out up the canyon, and very steep terrain, but much to Sarah’s relief we all love it. I worry slightly about Monty, who after all is only 5, because you wouldn’t really want to fall off in some of the places that we go, but the Western saddle has a useful post which he holds onto for grim death at sketchy moments.
The first ride is mostly at walking pace, interspersed by trotting, and this is enough for the kids. The last thing we want to do is scare them, after all.

Which is why the afternoon ride with Zak, Sarah and I agree afterwards, is probably a bit fast. In retrospect, perhaps Zak sensed a little impatience from my end (why do Americans say “on my end” by the way?) at the perambulatory pace, but we end up “cruising” on Barney Flats strung out at a full gallop. Jemima decides that cantering downhill is not for her, just yet. Eliza seems totally unfazed and whoops quite a lot, but it all gets a little much for Monty. Pay-check never actually breaks into a run, but high-speed trotting is acutely uncomfortable even if your testicles have yet to drop, and the final straw is an Irish ditch which Pay-check leaps quite athletically given his age, and Monty doesn’t think much of this frankly.

It is while gathering breath and comforting Monty that we notice that Sarah’s camera bag has come fully unzipped in all the excitement. Sarah’s technique with zip technology is to almost do the zips up to the end, leaving an enticement for the zip fastener to gradually edge open and I am constantly huffing and zipping up her bags. This is a top “I told you so” moment, but at least I get to go back along the trail looking for the camera. Miraculously, we find the errant item on the path about 200 yards back, intact, and so just have the video camera to find now. This proves more difficult and Wes and I spend an hour or so going back up the trail to where we started lopin’ but to no avail. In the back of my mind, there is a small chance (very small) that the video camera was never in the bag and is resting happily on the desk back in the cabin, and this is indeed where we find it in the end. Wes is pretty cool about all the wasted effort - “Any time spent on horseback doing pretty much anything is just fine with me” so all’s well in the end.