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Showing posts from September, 2017

Lentils and squirrels, the simple life

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(Yukon) You can pay a lot to de-stress yourself in a wilderness retreat with no internet, no mobile phone signal and no easy way in or out. Or you can just come here and give us 50 bucks. Trying to fix the world wide web We are still without the internet but with close relatives abroad, tax problems to sort out and tenants to manage we aren’t sitting around eating lentils, meditating and enjoying the luxury. Yellow souwester weather We’ve made one trip to town in lashing rain and fog to get a new modem, which didn’t work, and so will set off tomorrow with the satellite dish, tria arm and 100’ of cables to be tested by Bob, the internet guy. Hair-raising drive on the Top of the World highway Life without Facebook or Instagram means we have got on with stuff, which is a plus. Neil has gone mad for berry picking and jam making. I can barely tear him away from the cranberry bushes to help with our home improvement projects. Mashing berries. I

Jehovah's revenge

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(Yukon) Our house on arrival, bear boards still up You couldn’t make it up. Not one hour after I first set foot on our remote wilderness property, with no road access, no trail access and no airstrip, the bloody Jehovah’s Witnesses were knocking on the door. Or not quite at the door, but getting out of a jet boat onto my beach, with a glossy pamphlet to show me the error of my ways. Against all the odds our cache is still standing I’m using the first person singular here as Neil wasn’t with me. He took one look at the list of everything we have to do, thought fuck this, and high-tailed it back to England to escape to his comfy office job with the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority. The drive from Whitehorse. Neil not looking particularly happy to be back No not really, bless him, but we managed to hitch a ride with two separate friends who were heading upriver for a wedding in town. I went in the first boat with our dog, a gun and random other things,