The Big Woods Chronicles. Building a life.

The Amazon adventure is coming to an end and the next continuing story will be the adventure of our family`s move to Saltspring Island to pursue the ‘simple’ life. Giving up a good job and plunging into uncertainty with my family was the training we would use as the foundation for future adventures. Here is a little preview of this story.

                                                "Oh no!"says the chicken. " Not the CATS!"

Our Volkswagon van pulls to the side of the highway that climbs out of the Okanagan Valley and I stop my pick-up truck behind it. We are only ten minutes into the journey to the coast and already there is a problem. My wife Heather jumps out, looking green in the face, “Bill! The cats are puking and messing in the back!” she says, “ They will have to go in the truck with the goats and chickens”. As I delicately extract the cats in their cardboard box, while breathing through my mouth, I can see that our three young children, strapped in their seats, are close to gagging too. Those blasted feral cats that were pressed on us at the last minute by a fellow art teacher! Soon we are back on the road again, the cat box tucked into a space beside the farm animals and ‘Gus de bus’ scrambles on up the hillside ahead of me, a green fog wafting from all it`s open windows. ‘Upward! Onward!’ seems to have become our family motto in the last year since we decided to move ‘back to the land’ on a Canadian Gulf island.