I fell off the nature walk wagon this week. Or more precisely, I climbed aboard the baking wagon instead. I worked a full week of early mornings at Union Pacific and although some days the weather was nice enough for a walk, I was pretty beat. I'd run a few errands and then run home for a nap.
However, the experience gave me a good sense of the early hours in downtown Victoria. Every morning at 5:20AM, I'd head out the front door, walk over to Government Street, turn right and trek on the Herald Street. The city is very quiet this early, but not silent. Not by a long shot. Most days there were either street sweepers or garbage trucks looping through downtown. The street sweepers are especially noisy. More than noisy enough to wake up the unhoused folks trying to sleep in doorways. So once the machine noise stopped you'd get a hint of conversations.
The delivery trucks are in full motion too. This is the best chance to deliver food to the downtown restaurants and there were Sysco, GFS and independent trucks all over the place.
Not much non-human 'nature', though. The sun won't be up for another hour or two.
I walked in the rain twice, in a 'bomb cyclone' windstorm once and in between showers on the other three days. It's been a grey and rainy week. My work shoes leak terribly so I dodged all puddles and scampered from awning to awning along my route.
The neatest thing about the week was that the sun peeked through the clouds for at least an hour every single morning, so I could look out at a bit of blue sky and walk home in the dry. Plus, I got re-acquainted with the flock of sparrows who hang out on the UP patio, looking for crumbs.
While I was working on Saturday, Cindy headed to Witty's Lagoon for a hike with friends and brought back pictures that made me extremely jealous. Mostly blue skies, calm seas and some incredible, full waterfalls as they hiked inland. We've been having a lot of rain, so the creeks and rivers are all full again.
On Sunday, I got a car and headed to Elk Lake for the November stamp show. It was oppressively grey all day, even as I drove from the stamp show to our favourite grocery stores to get supplies for the week.
The grey skies and light rains carried through to Monday, so I stayed indoors for the most part. My body isn't used to production baking so I needed both days to recuperate. One more week of this guest baking gig and I can get back into the swing of proper nature walks.