2014
Once again it’s time to send our friends and family Christmas Greetings and best wishes for a happy holiday season and a safe and healthy year ahead. Please excuse the e-mail greeting but we have decided to avoid the commercialism of the season by forgoing gifts and cards in favour of charitable donations.
We have had another wonderful year indulging our wanderlust. We started in January with a 2 month trip to Sri Lanka. What a wonderful island with lovely beaches, ancient ruins, remains of a long colonial history, temples and churches from 3 main religions, tea plantations to hike through, and wonderful, warm, welcoming people wherever you go. Many places are only just opening up to tourists again after civil war and tsunami damage. We usually stayed in small guest houses where it was so interesting to hear people’s experiences. We so admire their resilience and appreciate our own good fortune.
In April we drove our camper van to Montreal where we stayed with Guy and Sylvie, friends we met camping last year. What amazing hosts and tour guides! Sadly we did not stay in Quebec as long as planned as it was such a late spring few parks or camp sites were open. We headed south to North Carolina before finding buds on the trees and sunshine. Always one of our favourite areas, we explored Shenandoah and Blue Ridge Parkway National Parks again before discovering new and wonderful mountain bike/hiking trails near Wilkesboro. Heading west we had longer stops in the trails around Albuquerque, Santa Fe, Moab, Fruita and Sun Valley.
We arrived home in early June ready to take full advantage of the local hiking, biking, beaches, music festivals, etc available in the area. In Sept. we went to central Oregon for more hiking and biking with friends Barb and Jim.
A week later Trish was off to England to stay with Keira and to visit friends and family she had not seen for up to 40 years. What amazing reunions reminiscing and catching up on each other’s news. Mom and daughter also had a great 2 day trip to Paris.
Mother Nature has not cooperated so ski season has barely started yet, but there is still lots of volunteering at the local performing arts centre and school reading program, and we’ve taken up yoga to try to keep the aging bodies flexible. Mike is biking in December for the first time!
Our other big news is that after 7 years together Kyle recently proposed to Alanna during their travels round New Zealand. That’s where Mike’s dad proposed to his mother so NZ must have a romantic effect on Vanderbeck men! We won’t know further plans until they get home later today. Kyle had an exceptionally busy season of firefighting after starting an electrical apprenticeship last winter.
Keira continues to work as an event planner in London. This year work travel has taken her to Hong Kong, Barcelona, Marseille, Glasgow and around the UK. Personal trips have included Greece, Turkey, Paris, Hawaii and Wales! She has those gypsy genes too!
As 2014 soon comes to an end, we especially look forward to2015 as Mike and Trish will have been together 40 years (married 39) and the old boy turns 70. He just treated himself to a new mountain bike which should keep the gears rolling for many more years!
We wish all of you the best for 2015 and look forward to hearing your news.
2013
Once again it’s time to wish family and friends a wonderful holiday season and health and happiness in the coming year.
As always we’ve had a year filled with great new adventures. We started off with a month in a rental suite in Sayulita, Mexico. A great opportunity to enjoy sand, surfing and trying to practice our minimal Spanish with the friendly locals. Kyle was able to join us for part of the time which was an added bonus.
We were home for 6 weeks of skiing and catching up with friends before we set off in our van for a 10 week trip to hike and bike in parks in Arizona, Texas, Louisiana, Alabama and South Dakota, with a family visit to Georgia as well. We prefer to get off the beaten track so highlights included a weekend of Cajun music at a Louisiana crawfish festival and steering around alligators as they basked along the bike trails in Texas! We revisited some favourite places (New Orleans and Big Bend National Park) and explored some new ones (Nashville and Mammoth Caves National Park), all the while meeting great locals and fellow campers.
We enjoyed the summer closer to home with kayaking, hiking and biking and blues festivals. Keira was home for a week so we took her to Whistler and to Nelson to visit Kyle and Alanna. He was actually able to spend 2 days with us before being called away to fight a fire. In September we took the van for 2 weeks touring parts of Oregon we’d not explored before, such as the lovely MacKenzie River hike/bike trail, John Day Fossil Beds and Pendleton’s historic underground tour.
Time at home is filled with book clubs, outdoors club, volunteering at the performing arts centre and elementary school reading program, biking, hiking, kayaking and skiing with friends. Retirement is wonderful if you can ignore the odd aching joints!
2012
Once again it’s time to connect with family and friends, and to look forward to hearing all your news. As always we’ve been fortunate to have had an amazing year, with a few challenges thrown in to keep things interesting!
January started off with another Asian trip. We flew to Myanmar (Burma) via Bangkok. We stayed the first few days in the huge, busy, polluted city of Yangon. Mike had injured his knee in late December so walking was limited. However we made the best of the situation and visited the amazing Shwedagon Pagoda and other sites. Mike got food poisoning on our last day which made the overnight bus ride to the ancient town of Bagan very challenging. Bagan with its fascinating history and very few people was a wonderful change to the big cities. We biked and travelled by horse drawn carts to explore the 1000s of temples, which are a UNESCO Heritage Site. We then caught an all day ferry up the mighty Irrawady River to Mandalay. Another busy noisy city! Again we spent a few days exploring the sights and food of the area including a side trip to the mountain town of Pyin U Lwin. We weren’t prepared for the cold nights but the surrounding area was lush and beautiful with a lovely botanical garden. We headed back to Mandalay and caught another overnight bus arriving in the mountain village of Kalaw at 3 in the morning! This area is famous for its trekking. Trish took advantage of a guide for 2 days while Mike enjoyed interacting with the locals. We then bused to Inle Lake which was the highlight of the trip. We spent a week biking and touring the area around the lake. It’s famous for its villages on stilts and the local fishermen’s one legged rowing style. The way of life hasn’t altered in centuries but we watched villagers gather in awe at their first sight ever of a backhoe, a bulldozer and a hot air balloon, so things will change quickly. We are glad we visited Miramar in 2012 as the country has just opened up to tourism. You are limited where you can travel and the infrastructure is underdeveloped, especially in the two large cities. However, the people are so friendly and welcoming and the trip was a definite “must do” on our bucket list.
Next we flew to Malaysia. We explored Georgetown, another UNESCO Heritage Site with its rich history of Chinese, Indian, British and Malay populations. The resulting selection of cuisine made dining a real pleasure!! Next it was off to a week of beaching on the island of Langkawi before we headed to the tea plantations in the Cameron Highlands back on the mainland. The tea was great but the hydroponically grown strawberries were to die for!!!
The rest of the year involved a number of camping trips including 6 weeks to Colorado, Utah, Arizona, California and Nevada in the spring. Trish hiked, Mike biked, and we both enjoyed reunions with many old friends along the way. On father’s day Mike crashed his mountain bike, resulting in a trip to the hospital with multiple broken ribs. That took the wind out of his sails for the summer but we did manage camping trips to a couple of Blues festivals, a weekend at Whistler with our friend Jean, and 2 weeks in Sept camping, kayaking and biking in Washington and Idaho. Trish also still has hiking and book clubs, and volunteering at the theatre.
Kyle continues to spend half the year as a forest fire fighter based out of Nelson. The season got off to a very slow start with the wet spring but he got very busy in the fall. For one deployment he was based in the polygamous Mormon community of Bountiful, which was very interesting! However he was too busy to find himself a child bride and is now living with his girlfriend Alanna in Nanaimo where she is taking a holistic nutritionist course for a year.
Keira continues to live in London. Once work with the Olympics/Paralympics was over she came home for a quick visit and to be a bridesmaid for a friend. We managed a wonderful family reunion in Nanaimo. She’s now back in London and her current assignment is working on an event to take place in Jaipur, India in January, so she’ll be there for 2 weeks.
A year after his original injury, Mike celebrated American Thanksgiving with arthroscopic knee surgery. It been a tough year for his 67 year old body but all is healing, (even if way too slowly for his liking!)
In Jan we head to Sayulita, Mexico, a surfing village just north of Puerto Vallarta. We are actually going to stay in one location for the entire month!
Once again as we reflect on the past year, we recognize how fortunate we are to be able to enjoy this lifestyle that has provided us with an amazing family and so many long standing friends, travel buddies and wonderful adventures. Long may this journey continue!
Happy holidays to all!
2011
Once again it’s time to send love and best wishes to all our family and friends for a wonderful holiday season and year ahead.
It’s been another amazing year for all the Vanderbeck family. Sadly our newsletter won’t be up to it’s usual standard as our editor Keira has moved away, but we’ll do our best!
Mike and Trish started the year with another trip to Asia. It began with a wonderful relaxing week of beaching and snorkeling on the island of Ko Ngai in southern Thailand. Then we took overnight trains to Nong Khai on the Thai/Laos border and spent a few days exploring there before heading onto Vietianne, capital of Laos. From there the true adventure began as we left the main tourist routes to attend the annual elephant festival in Paklay. This involved 8 hour rides each way over unpaved dusty roads. Going we at least had a regular public bus, along with double the scheduled amount of passengers, bags of rice, chickens, etc. Coming back we had an equally overcrowded pick up truck with hard wooden benches. Infact some of our group stood on the back step for 4 hours! But the festival itself was an amazing experience with parades of villagers and elephants decked up in garlands, displays of logging and bathing the elephants in the river, and a carnival atmosphere throughout the village. Very few westerners attend so we got lots of stares from local kids. We were put up in a homestay where they spoke no English, but we got along with smiles and pointing! When we returned to Luang Prabang we were happy to relax in more luxury, and met up with Keira and Kyle’s friends who happened to be there at the same time. Nice to show them around waterfalls, temples and eateries that we’d discovered on a previous visit, plus the amazing night market. (Poor Mike’s backpack was loaded down with a hand sewn quilt for the rest of the trip!)
Then we flew to Malaysian Borneo, a highlight of all our Asian travels. We saw orangutans swing through the trees of a reserve, hiked through the tropical jungle in 4 national parks, took an overnight boat trip up the mighty Rejang river, and visited longhouse villages and cultural centres, meeting fascinating people all along the way.
Summer came late to BC before we finally could start camping trips in our van. We stayed relatively close to home this year with biking/hiking/kayaking trips in Idaho and Washington states and 3 day music festivals in BC and Washington. (Dave Matthews Band, Mike’s favourite). Keira was home a couple of times for a wedding in the area and to join us on a trip to visit Kyle and Alanna in Nelson. He was back there firefighting this summer but due to the wet spring there were minimal fires. He spent May in Alberta but then never saw another flame, although they did prevention work instead. No overtime is good for the provincial budget but not his! He’s currently travelling round India and Sri Lanka with Alanna. They’ll be back just in time for Xmas and will ski and snowboard until next firefighting season, with some teaching thrown in for Alanna!
Keira decided that turning 30 was a good time to make some changes in her life. Never one to do things by halves she upped and moved to England in Sept. She’s living in London and has a job with a sports event planning company so is working on the 2012 Olympics contracts. She’s met up with lots of friends she met working the Vancouver Olympics and is thoroughly enjoying life so far.
We’re off to Myanmar and Penang, Malaysia in January, so the adventure continues. I still volunteer regularly at the local performing arts centre so get my fill of concerts, ballet and shows. Mike puts his mountain and road bikes to good use, and ski season is off to a good start. Add to that book club, hiking with the outdoors club and time spent with good friends; we have so much to be grateful for.
We hope that all of you are enjoying life as much as we are. We look forward to hearing from many of you over the holiday period. May 2012 be a great year for you all.
2010
2009
2008
2007
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