Challenges

I do a few challenges a year. Mostly they are prescribed by me on me. But this year has been a bit different already. I actually created my own Reading Challenge for friends, family and friends of friends and friends of family and have 9 readers who took up that challenge. This was an aspiration that I set for myself in 2019. Now all that is left is to get it to work well.

Also on January 3rd, a friend invited me to a 7 day Facebook Travel Photo challenge, which I accepted. Here are the photos I submitted. The challenge was to be post travel photos with no explanation so on this post I will use those images and add where the photo was taken and a bit of background.

Brian and I took a street art walking tour of Glasgow (designed by me) with the Kelvingrove Museum as an end goal. What an amazing day. I found a map on the Glasgow Tourism site (I think) and set up our day. The street art was beautiful , you can see some of it by clicking here.

The museum has two displays I was particularly interested in. The hanging heads – a whimsical installation of – literally – heads. Happy, sad, sneering, laughing, crying, disgusted heads! And the Salvador Dali painting of Christ of St. John of the Cross. It is like no other painting of Jesus on the cross that I’ve ever seen -well what would one expect from a Dali really. It was painted at an extreme angle and Jesus is set in a darkened unforgiving sky. It says that Dali dreamed this painting before creating it. I expect the same could be said for much of his work.

Kim, Sister and I were on our way to Salvation Mountain and Slab City but had to stop at Shield’s Date Farm for refreshments and to check out the date palms and display garden in Indio first. Not a bad lunch but I wouldn’t bother going back to the farm again.

We went on a 7 day catamaran holiday January 2017 to the British Virgin Islands with Captain Jack and his first mates Sven and Don – this is NOT a catamaran. What an amazing experience! Sadly, in September that year Hurricane Irma hit the islands and caused so much damage. I can’t help but wonder about some of our favourite places and how long it took to recover and reopen: The Soggy Dollar Bar (a sunny place for shady people). All of you freezing in Alberta right now will appreciate this webcam view! Another favourite was Foxy’s. And since I am able to put in links to both it would appear that all is well in BVI!

Kim and I spent a fun week traipsing around Victoria, going to many places I had not been to before. There is a very pretty market in Esquimalt called The Market Garden that was full of local produce, (some of it grown in their back garden where this photo was taken), beautiful jars of homemade preserves, art and a bit of decor as well. It made for a lovely couple of hours. We tried to get some photos of some sort of bird (I can’t remember what type now) and ended with lots of garden photos – the birds took off as soon as we had our cameras poised!

Okay, so this is not the sunset photo I actually ended up posting. We are currently on a road trip and I did not have very good internet that night so posted a photo of a Churchill, Manitoba sunset instead. This is in BVI and the one I had originally intended to post. Every night BVI presented herself in her elegant beauty. Manitoba’s sunset roared at us and almost blew us over! It was stunning, brilliant and almost blinding; BVI’s was subtle, soothing and gently lulled us into another glass of wine!

This is a very artfully lit cactus (thank you Sol). The photo was taken at the Moorten Botanical Gardens in Palm Springs. I had driven by it many times and never bothered to stop. I will most definitely be returning though. It’s a small garden so you probably don’t need to set aside more than an hour to an hour and a half to go around and get you photos, but stay longer if the light isn’t shining on your cactus for the picture you’ve envisioned or just come back later. It’s pretty cheap to enter. They charge only $5 but the garden is filled with every kind of cactus imaginable.

And last, but certainly not least is from BD’s and my trip to the Isle of May in Scotland. It was a stormy wet day and the boat ride was rough – very very rough. Some of our group did not make it without leaving a bit of themselves behind! BD does not get bothered by boat motion, I am dead quiet and stare straight ahead and cope quite well as long as I don’t deviate from this pattern.

The island is an amazing place to visit. There are so many different species of birds and they are everywhere! Did you know that puffins can live for up to 20 years, they do not start breeding until they are around 5 years old and once the chicks leave their nest they go out to sea and live in open water for 2 – 3 years before returning to their place of birth? Yup, I learned this on our trip to the Isle of May!

This was a pretty long post, hope you got through it!!!