Sea Sled madness. It’s in my brain.

The insurance is if you smoke a batch of epoxy and burn the place down; is it not?

But you are gonna have a rough go finding an underwriter.

 

I thought there was plenty of space in Canada !

 

Generally tons...but Vancouver is mountains right up to the ocean. You live in a narrow temperate strip between the stuff you drown in, and the rest of Canada which is uninhabitable tundra, or worse: Toronto.

 

It even looks cold, here in Queensland a cold night is when you have to draw up a blanket, instead of a sheet ! Not ideal for laminating in the Canadian winter.

 

God yeah. Toronto. Just think of it. Hell. Now I need to take a dump. Toronto.

But Vancouver is where far too many people want to live, so space is outrageously expensive.

 

Funny how Vancouver has been the locale for a few movies over the years.

 

Mr Efficiency, all the rest of Canada is cold as death in the winter, and hot in the summer, and miserably buggy in between. Except Vancouver which is cool and damp in the winter, pleasantly warm in the summer, and basically perfect in the spring and fall. Mountains with snow all around, ocean right here. Best food in the world. Incredible wilderness a short drive away. Lots of good paying jobs. Like that.

 

Yes, it has to be popular for a reason. I really think you have to be born to the colder climates, although you could probably say the same about tropical heat and humidity. It is what you become accustomed to. Though I always think, it is easier to dress to be warm, than to discard clothes to cool down.

 

Well...part of the reason is incredibly lax rules about money laundering and real estate purchasing, making Vancouver a global haven for laundering money from mainland China and India. But there are also nice features. My people are nordic, as are my wife's, and we don't cope well with heat. But forty below on a mountain...that's very survivable for us.

Although, as you say, it just involves putting on more clothes. We went to Palm Springs one summer, in the deserts of central California, and it was hard to do anything but soak in a pool. 40C is the temperature at which Canadian bones spontaneously catch fire. I would guess half of Australia would kill us with heat, at least six months a year.

 

The Australian summer is a little much, and getting hotter. Without that cooling South-East trade wind, the more populated East coastal strip would be a pain in summer.

 

40 below? Yea, NO! There's not enough clothes in the world for me. It gets below 60°F down here and I start getting a little chilly.

 

I spent one winter in the arctic. -57 with wind chiĺl.

 

I want to move there now.

I have nordic blood as well. Wife wants to move to Florida, I say no way.

 

Yeah that's chilly.

I remember arriving at my wife's family cabin in northern Ontario one year in February. 42 below; took a long time to heat up the cabin! Every piece of interior furnishing, every ounce of mass in the walls, everything, all -42 degrees and acting as a giant heat sink. I had the fire going pretty quickly but you didn't want to get far from it for the first 24 hours or so. Sitting on any furniture other than the couch directly in front of the stove would pull heat out of you and you'd go from comfortable to chilled to the bone in seconds. Although there the air was so still that as long as you didn't touch anything, you could walk around in jeans and a sweater and be fine.

When I first walked up to the cabin, though, I grabbed the padlock to open it up with my bare hand and froze part of my index finger solid. Hurt like hell when it thawed out and I eventually lost a bunch of flesh off the first pad and part of my palm. Happened almost instantly.

Anyway I don't mind a bit of winter but I prefer the ocean. I have lived away from it for a few years here and there but I always miss it and come back. Now I'm pretty settled just across the strait from Vancouver and it would be hard to pry me out of my location here.

 

I'd be glad to see you.