Rebecca M. Douglass, Author

  Title: The Curve of Time: New, Expanded Edition Author: M. Wylie Blanchet Publication Info: Whitecap Books, 2011, 272 pages. Originally published by Blackwood & Sons in 1961. Source: Library P ublisher's Blurb : Widowed at the age of thirty-five, Muriel Wylie Blanchet packed up her five children in the summers that followed and set sail aboard the twenty-five-foot Caprice . For fifteen summers, in the 1920s and 1930s, the family explored the coves and islands of the BC coast, encountering settlers and hermits, hungry bears and dangerous tides, and falling under the spell of the region’s natural beauty. Driven by curiosity, the family followed the quiet coastline, and Blanchet—known as Capi, after her boat—recorded their wonder as they threaded their way between the snowfields, slept under the bright stars and wandered through Indigenous winter villages left empty in the summer months. The Curve of Time weaves the story of these years into a memoir that has insp...

I've been pretty quiet for quite a while, and it's time I got back on the blogging schedule! I've been enjoying some great trips--I even got to see Comet Tsuchinshan-ATLAS from a perch in the Grand Canyon! And followed it up with several days in the Bay Area with my kids, engaging in some house-hunting on their behalf, which is both fun and stressful as all get out. As a result, very little writing has happened (again). I did work a little on the poor sad short story that keeps getting shunted aside in favor of another hike, and of course, the new book has a cover, is formatted, and--ta-da! -- has a release date! So here it is:  It's available November 18, just in time to give copies as Christmas presents! So that's pretty cool. I still have some tinkering to do with the formatting but it is substantially finished--and I'm really excited, both for the release and to be working on the next book! Edited Out has been patiently waiting its turn for revisions, and Bo...

In addition to the recent hike on the West Coast Trail, I enjoyed a few smaller adventures on Vancouver Island recently. Enjoy the photos! Besides the beaches on the trail, we visited Quadra Island and found some pretty beaches there. Tidepools with crabs, as well as tiny fish and shrimp (not shown). Comox Harbour Rebecca Spit. Of course, with a name like that, I had to visit! I also took a hike in the Paradise Lakes area of Strathcona Provencial Park. Paradise Meadows Battleship Lake Mountain stream Of course, a trip like this was also all about the ferries (all told, including the tiny "ferry" that took us down the lake to start the backpack trip, we rode 5). Large BC Ferries vessels to take us from Tsawassen (Vancouver BC) to Nanaimo. Leaving Vancouver, Mt. Baker dominates the skyline to the south. There's a sharp line where the muddied waters of the Fraser River flow into the Salish Sea. The small ferries that serve Quadra and the other islands are open-ended like the...

This week we continue with our Kenyan safaris. The other posts from my Africa trip are: Arusha , Tarangire National Park , South Serengeti Part 1 , South Serengeti Part 2 ,  the rest of the Serengeti tour ,  Ngorogoro Crater ,  Mt. Meru , Mt. Kenya, Part 1 , Mt. Kenya, Part 2 , and Kenya Safari Part 1 .  After our short and early drive at Lake Nakuru, we settled in for our 250-mile drive, which took 8 hours altogether--another day to stretch our boxed breakfast into a lunch! The drive wasn't without interest (great vistas of the Great Rift Valley, and insights into the transit problems of a country whose main truck route is a two-lane road), but we were glad to arrive at Amboseli National Park. A glad sight. Amboseli greeter. Back to Masai Giraffes, here just a few miles north of the Tanzania border. A really sweet room. Fences kept out the larger animals, but you had to be careful to keep the patio door latched when not in the room--the baboons painted on the wall a...

Our Africa treks completed, we segued seamlessly back to African massage--i.e., too many hours sitting in a safari vehicle, bouncing over rough roads. We planned too many things too far apart (distances are longer in Africa than in the US, there being no freeways with 80-mph speed limits), but still really appreciated our overview of the country. The other posts from my Africa trip: Arusha , Tarangire National Park , South Serengeti Part 1 , South Serengeti Part 2 ,  the rest of the Serengeti tour ,  Ngorogoro Crater ,  Mt. Meru , Mt. Kenya, Part 1 , and Mt. Kenya, Part 2 .   We shifted from the Mt. Kenya trek to the safari at the park gate, and were soon bouncing along the roads down and around the mountain toward the Samburu Reserve--a drive of some 105 miles that took 5 hours, and dropped us from 9800' to about 3300'. The resulting increase in temperature sapped what was left of our energy, and the delay of lunch until after 3 p.m. nearly killed me. Road scenes: ...