The dollars are inches thick on Cabbage Key's walls, and eventually, they are donated to charity.

Fishermen began the tradition of sticking a buck on the wall many years ago. Back then, it seemed a convenient way to ensure they’d have money for food when they stopped at the island, even when the day’s fishing had proved fruitless. The dollar-on-the-wall trend really took off in the late 1970s, after Jimmy Buffet had a meal at the restaurant. He dedicated his song, Cheeseburger in Paradise, to the staff at Cabbage Key, and added a signed dollar to the wall. After that, the dollars came pouring in – along with the diners, who continue to flock to the Key -accessible only by boat – to this day.

Diners scrawl their names on dollar bills and stick them to the wall at Cabbage Key Restaurant

They come for cheeseburgers and key lime pie, but also for a small taste of simple island life. Entertainment on Cabbage Key is provided by large gopher turtles who stare up inquisitively at their human onlookers, and mischievous sea otters who nimbly steal fish off the motorboats tethered to the pier. If you’re a fan of big city life, a stay on Cabbage Key might drive you to distraction. But if you’re looking for a real getaway from mainstream life, coupled with a cheeseburger, well, this could be paradise.

Cabbage Key Island, as seen from the island's watertower overlooking the Gulf.

Mountains,....and more mountains

It may well be country’s best train, but after staring at snow-capped mountains for a couple of hours, the only thing I can feel is the numbness of my derriere and a growing sense of impatience. Through the microphone, one of the staff is launching into her third story of the day, a banal tale about how she grew up in Kamloops, how mom and dad still live there and how she’s calling them to let them know we’re all coming for dinner in a few hours. Just kidding, she says with a high-pitched giggle that makes me want to hit her. Hard.

She’s right about one thing. Eleven hours after laying our bums in the seats, we will mercifully step off the train into the dark night of Kamloops. Here, we’ll overnight in a Best Western that’s not seen a face-lift since the day it was built. It’s the kind of place with bedcovers that make you shudder at the thought of what others may have done in that room in the recent past. If I had a sanitizing spray, I’d be using it right then.

The day started okay. Raspberry scones to nibble on and scenery that was certainly lovely – at first. But just how many times can you marvel at the mountains? I thought two-to-three hours was ample time, and after that got restless.

Raspberry scones, croissants and a delicious breakfast as the view whistles by

Trouble is, on a train there is nowhere to go. Step outside with the camera, as the rest of the guests are doing every time a train guide yells “Photo opportunity!” through the microphone – and you freeze your buns off – though at least a little sensation returns briefly to the area. What do they do with those pictures anyway, I’m wondering, as a crew of grinning, enthusiastic boomers snap their expensive cameras incessantly from the vestibule.

Have camera, will photograph

By the time the formal breakfast is served – omelets over stilted conversation with a couple from Kingston, Ont., I’m doing my nut. Still, I smile sweetly and try to make conversation as they do their best not to reciprocate the effort. Lunch is slightly less painful but not very. The commentary from the microphone becomes harder to listen to as the day wears on and for what seems like an interminable period, we come to a complete standstill while waiting for a freight train to pass.

Are we there yet?

This is the part they don’t tell you in the brochures: that a trip that takes six hours by car driving at a leisurely pace, will take 11 by train at a speed that varies between no motion, slow motion and motion that’s only slightly faster. After the scrabble set has been played until we run out of letters, and the magazines have been read cover to cover, my husband  starts quipping. “Pass me a knife, so I can put an end to my misery,’ he exclaims. “I’m going to go around the carriage with a hat and try to solicit some drugs from the old folks, to pass the time.”

Everyone except those who do it think travelwriting is the ultimate career. It sounds so thrilling: traveling all over the world without necessarily having to fork out any money in the process. What they don’t realize is that there are long periods of boredom, numb backsides and the pressure of having to transform what is often a mediocre experience into something that sounds phenomenal. Readers mostly don’t get to hear about the staff who won’t let go of the microphone or the quirky and often downright weird personalities of traveling companions along the way.

Take the old couple sitting behind us, smiling sweetly until I asked if I could read part of the newspaper that lay at their feet. “I’ll let you take it but you’ll have to give it back,” she said with more than a hint of menace in her cracking voice.

Two hours from Vancouver and the word beauty is lost from the vocabulary entirely. We’re passing through an industrial area that would make a sty look appealing: tin roofed buildings, filthy machinery and scrappy trees that do nothing to hide the ugliness. If I had a car I’d have been home hours ago, but instead I’m prisoner to a train, moving slowly through a nowhere land of railway debris towards a destination that’s taking way, way too long to reach.

The track is long, endless, some might argue

ð       It’s because everywhere I go I hear the ringing of slot machines, a persistent ding-ding-ding that penetrates my head and makes it ache with its non-stop hammering of electronic sound.

ð       It’s because there is glitter everywhere but no feeling of true worth. Everything in Las Vegas is measured by money or sex appeal, two empty holes that shine brightly but promise nothing in the end. There is no substance behind them, just lights and a blinding glimmer of nothingness.

ð       It’s because women are nothing but objects of desire here, buttocks belching between pantyhose and breasts uncontained. “Give me tips,” they suggest. “Look at me. Desire me.” In Las Vegas it’s as if there was no women’s rights movement at all.

ð       It’s because of the greed I see in this city. Greed to have more money, to look sexier, to be more desirable, to stay in a better hotel and eat in a better restaurant. It’s because there is no sense of ‘enough’ here, this city where greed rules the strip and commands the attention of everyone who enters it.

Behind Vegas's Flashy Neon Lights? Just a Ghostly Emptiness

ð       It’s because I see no beauty on the strip, no kindness, no real meaning or value. It’s all lights and fountains, hotels of behemoth proportions and the smell of money in the air. “I made more than you,” is the mantra here, a sense of competition that courses through the streets and into the hotels.

WildCraft Tea Plantation in Lumby, BC is the only one of its kind in Canada

Elzer brews tea from the wild plants and fruit he gathers, among them Oregon grape, wild mint, hawthorn berry and wild strawberry. His farm straddles the fertile Okanagan Valley and the mountains, but his harvesting ground extends over 15,000 acres. It stretches from the majestic Monashee Mountain Range to the Shuswap River watershed, a region with a combination of ecosystems he says is unique. “Having desert scrubland so close to rainforest makes a great combination for gathering botanicals,” he explains.

Elzer’s gathering or ‘wildcrafting’ takes him on frequent excursions deep into the rainforests, journeys on which bear spray is a must-have item in the event he should run into black or grizzly bears. The end result of his foraging is an interesting blend of different teas that vary in composition depending on what he’s managed to harvest in a given season.

This basket of dried wild herbs, fruit and flowers offers a veritable taste of the BC rainforest

On an April visit to the Wild Tea Plantation we scooped our hands into a large basket filled with aromatic dried and chopped plants left over from the Fall harvest and used to flavor the wild tea. Elzer’s artisan blends, displayed in wine bottles on the shelves of his store, included “Right of Passage,” a tea containing spearmint, lemon thyme and calendula flowers, and “Coyote Sleeping,” a mint and lilac blend named for the mountain on which its ingredients were gathered.

“We do a lot of experimenting around taste, following ancient traditions and aboriginal compositions,” he explained, as we hiked into Wildcraft Forest, Canada’s only wild tea plantation. Keeping a careful lookout for bears, we followed him up an incline, inspecting Oregon grape plants, thimble berry, wild raspberry and ponderosa pine along the way. As the summer months draw closer, Elzer will renew his tradition of wildcrafting, using those ingredients and many others to make a new mix of artisan teas flavored by the forest. It’s a business based on permaculture and one he has spent 20 years cultivating. “Our teas are a blend of living things” he says. “This is a rich opportunity to taste the British Columbia wilderness.”
For more information, visit www.wildcraftforest.com or call (250) 547-2001

Another meal of salmon?

My political motives for the diet hadn’t changed. I still hate the thought of animals being bred and harvested for their meat, something I feel is fundamentally wrong. I don’t ever want to visit an abattoir or see the moment of their slaying. And I don’t want to know how they end up on a plate looking like a tasty T-bone. But at the same time I am ready to expand my horizons, to stop thinking so hard and give myself the freedom to enjoy food a little more than I have to date.

I still love a good veggie meal. But it's nice to have more options sometimes.

The change happened quickly and seamlessly, much to the shock of my husband and friends. I’ve become the focus of animated meal time conversation about how pseudo vegetarians can ‘come around’ even after 20-odd years of avid meat denial. In some ways I feel I’ve let the team down by moving the boundaries of my eating preferences. But I think it’s okay to re-think some decisions and open doors previously under lock and key.
My friend Sam used her 40th to inspire major weight loss, dissatisfied with the pounds that had steadily climbed aboard her once slender frame. For six months before her birthday she changed her lifestyle, eating more sensibly and exercising in ways she’d not done before, determined not to start her next decade at the heavy end of the scale.
The 40s are a life-changing time for many women. They’re a time when we embrace the highlights and hair colourings we previously rejected, adamant about staving off the visibility of those ugly grey strands that remind us just how old we are.

In the wake of highlights, my kids ask me, "Mom, how did you hair turn so light?"

Some friends are embracing botox; for others eyelash extensions are the new beauty must-have. “I don’t think anyone our age should be wearing a bikini,” one friend declared at the swimsuit store. Her comment made me wonder. Is there a cut-off age for some types of clothing? Does 40 mean redefining the parameters of sexiness? And do we now need to embrace a more aged or mature version of self-expression?
I’m still figuring the answers out as I muddle along, trying as best I can to hide the signs of age. The laugh lines that are starting to develop. The loose skin that was firm just yesterday, or so I thought. The mounting number of indications that, in the absence of plastic surgery, point steadfastly to the fact that age wise, I am definitely moving north.
Meantime, I bask in the glow of infrequent comments to the contrary. Like when a stranger tells me I look too young to have kids. Or when an aesthetician seems stunned at my real age, explaining my skin suggests I’m way younger. Chances are, these are statements of pure flattery aimed to help me feel good.
But at this point I’m not thinking too hard about where they come from.
I’ll take ’em, no problem.

A half hour’s drive from Lake Charles and an $8 ticket will buy you a seat on one of the floats and a day’s worth of companions well stocked with candy, cold drinks and bead necklaces. Convene early at the Knights of Columbus Hall and you’ll catch someone’s grandma in the kitchen, stirring the contents of a massive pot of gumbo for the afternoon’s free refreshments.

Outside, the parking area is filled with the smoky smell of barbecue pork in case anyone gets hungry before the festivities begin. Locals arrive slowly for the parade during which the chicken run occurs. They watch with interest as a truck pulls up with five live chickens that symbolize an ingredient in the gumbo they’ll later be eating.

These chickens are lucky, as they’ll be spared from the gumbo for a while, at least. Their predecessors back in 1978, when the Iowa Chicken Run first started, had their necks wrung right away so they could be added to that day’s gumbo. If nothing else, these chickens will get the thrill of the chase on Fat Tuesday and have a few days or weeks extra before they become chicken stew.

The washboard is a traditional instrument used to create Zydeco music.

An older man with a broad smile takes out his scrub board and begins to play zydeco music, quickly joined by a teenager on an accordion. Impromptu dancing breaks out, samples of alligator jerky are passed around and the atmosphere is warm and friendly, with exuberant greetings of ‘happy Mardi Gras!’ as friends and relatives say hello.

Pronounced “I-oh-way,” this town’s chicken run is all about community spirit. While the floats in Lake Charles are elaborate assemblies of shapes and figures, the Iowa parade features little more than a dozen four wheel drive mules and trailers carrying portapotties. The fancier floats boast a trail of glittery ribbons and a few folks with festive hats and one-piece outfits in the Mardi Gras colors. But there’s no krewe here, no king, queen or other members of royalty. Just down-home, friendly people with a tradition they cherish, ensuring it keeps going for another year.

The parade heads west on Highway 90, passing local businesses and neighborhoods where just a handful of families stand by the roadside watching. In Lake Charles bystanders at the parades are literally weighed down by the sheer quantity of bead necklaces tossed their way. But in Iowa the beads are more of a novelty, and spectators run to pick them up, a look of pleased surprise on their faces and a ‘thank you’ on their lips.

The music is catchy during the Chicken Run, and the atmosphere is happy and friendly.

At various intervals, the procession stops, the captain blows his whistle and the music and dancing begins outside someone’s home. If the homeowners approve of the display, they hand over an ingredient for the gumbo. A large man reaches into the chicken cage sitting aboard one of the floats, and extracts a feathered bird as the children gather, ready to pounce the moment the chicken is released. But that chicken is fast and cunning. After dodging outstretched arms and giving the kids a good run it takes shelter beneath a parked truck.

It would likely have stayed for a while in that shady space had not someone with slender arms reached beneath the truck and yanked it into the open, dangling it victoriously by the foot. The crowd of 200 bursts into cheer and the parade continues, stopping intermittently at the homes of various individuals to place bead necklaces around the elderly and draw them into the celebration.

This little girl was thrilled to be the first to catch the chicken. "It was real hard to catch him," she declared.

It’s a striking contrast from the previous night’s Royal Gala in Lake Charles, where krewes paraded their kings and queens in ornate, elaborate costumes, feathers dropping from their headpieces as they nodded to the crowds and curtsied before the Mardi Gras royalty. The outfits of each krewe were grander, more splendid than the next: costumes reminiscent of pirates and oceans, dukes and duchesses. The glitter quotient alone called for sunglasses, and the cost of each outfit easily soared to thousands of dollars.

The costumes for Mardi Gras are ornate, with no cost spared.

In Iowa, the greatest allocation of funds to the Mardi Gras celebration was towards the contents of the gumbo the community and its visitors would share after its chicken run and parade were over. There would be no segregation between young and old, local or out-of-towner, rich or poor at the tables festively laid at the KC Hall. Iowa’s Mardi Gras chicken run cuts through the lines of age, economics, race and background. It’s about one thing and one thing only: community spirit. Add a steaming pot of gumbo, and you leave with the kind of memories that keep you smiling.

The Chicken Run in Iowa attracts young and old.

With glee, he can now anticipate when a previously inexplicable mood swing is purely hormonal and when it may have more rational origins. Before the app, this was a source of much confusion.

“I think your friend is coming soon,” he would say in the heat of an argument, using the term ‘friend’ euphemistically to refer to my period. “Or perhaps she’s already arrived?”

Mention of my cycle would be an almost certain guarantee to send whatever remaining composure I possessed at that moment flying straight out the window. A fury would streak through me. How typical that he would attribute my frustration or anger to my hormones! How dare he try to reduce this particular issue to that? The invective would fly, body temperatures would rise and the result would be a day of tension, hurt feelings and misunderstanding, fights sparked and reignited like wildfire.

Frankly, sometimes he was spot on. On more than one occasion, the onset of my period was truly imminent. Its pending arrival would cause a rash of frustration, sorrow, anger and impatience that would come from nowhere, spilling all over the house like a toxic cloud.
In the thick of that cloud, I had no perspective on what brought it on, what fed its onslaught and how to see beyond its smoky darkness. All I could feel was the fury, and it exploded around me as I vented pent-up grievances and other small molehills that suddenly assumed mountainous proportions. “Kids, you might want to stay away from mom today,” my husband would caution.

The new app gives him the power of prediction, the luxury of reading my hormonal signals with more accuracy. Turning on the i-Pad, he can now say gently and with greater certainty, “Let’s discuss this issue in a week or so, honey,” when I divulge a problem on my mind. Often they’re small things. The toilet paper roll that he seems incapable, ever, of replacing. Messy clothes on the floor, or his tendency to threaten the kids with punishment but seldom mete it out, even when it’s long overdue.

My husband is a mensch. But at a certain time of the month, those little details start to drive me wild.

You’d think after a quarter century of experiencing the monthly cycle, I might have more insight into how it affects me. But no – each month I’m blindsided with emotion, a gushing stream of frustrated grievances that flows rapidly before ebbing and disappearing into the sigh of oblivion for another 28 days. My husband sighs with relief when he senses the ambush is over.

Now, thanks to the app, he doesn’t have to rely on a sixth sense anymore. The calendar lays it all out in careful detail, available at the touch of a fingertip.

I’m not a big fan of technology, but I admit this app is cool, even though it’s way off track this month and monitoring my body with alarming ineptitude. Still, it speaks volumes about how much he loves me, how much he fears ‘that time of the month’ and how willing he is to try to understand me better, even after all this time.

As my children grow up, I’ve learned that traveling in their company can be exhilarating. Together we get that precious one-on-one time, and they get to meet new people and have experiences they’d otherwise not have. I try to take them one at a time to reduce the headache of intervening in fights and arguments. Selfishly, I want each child all to myself, without having to share him or her with siblings. Luckily, they want mom to themselves, as well.

There’s a lineup when it comes to traveling with my children, and it has a serious sequence that no-one in the family is allowed to forget. As one child’s turn comes up, the others ponder the fairness of the matter. Will her trip be a better one than mine was? they ask. Who will get more nights away with mom, they wonder. Who will sleep in a nicer hotel and do more fun things? If there’s anything unfair about the comparison, they voice their objections loudly.

When it was my eight-year-old daughter’s turn to pack her bags, her excitement knew no bounds. She organized her clothes months before our departure date, researched the hotels online and familiarized herself with the itinerary. It was going to be a spectacular few days in snow country and she was ready for it, with a brand new pair of snow pants and gloves bought specially for the trip. She patiently counted down the days until we left, informing each of her teachers at school where she was going and why. “It’s my turn to travel with my mom,” she said proudly.

For her sake as much as mine, I wanted the trip to be spectacular. Which is why I was so devastated when I fell on our first day and injured my back. Had I been alone it wouldn’t have been so bad. But to have my daughter witness my pain and discomfort made the situation feel much worse. She’d been counting on this time with her mom, and instead, she was stuck with a semi-invalid who had to pop a lot of pills – none of which made much difference.

I ploughed through the three days after my fall, silently begging the Advil for more relief and climbing gratefully into bed at night, proud that I’d made it through the schedule without tears. My daughter looked on anxiously, unfooled by my efforts to pretend I was okay. “How’s your back, mom?” became her constant refrain, a vain hope it would mend quickly and we could get on with the fun together.
Back pain is my nemesis twice a year and when it arrives, it does so excruciatingly and suddenly. Its onset means two weeks of pill-popping pain, visits to the chiro and massage therapist and a horribly skew posture. I spend a lot of time in bed – when I’m not on an assignment in snow country, that is.

As guilty as I felt that I’d inadvertently ruined her trip, my daughter rose gracefully to the occasion. She agreed to go horseback riding through the hills while I watched from the lodge, in too much discomfort to even consider mounting a horse. She packed our clothes up when I couldn’t bend to reach them, helped me with my socks and shoes when they, too, were out of reach and watched over me with anxious eyes, doing all she could to help.

I tell my kids that each trip has some good and some bad, and that you have to take the good with the bad. There will inevitably be delays, mislaid items and plans that don’t turn out the way you thought they would. It’s all part of the experience of traveling, and no amount of organizing ahead of time can predict precisely what will happen when you’re in the moment. In the wake of our snow country trip, I get to add ‘invalid mother’ to the list of things that can possibly go wrong.

Taking the kids gives them a chance to grow, though I never know exactly where that growth will be. In my daughter’s case, I got a glimpse of her maternal instinct and of the caring, watchful mother she will be someday. I’m just hoping she didn’t leave scarred with the impression of the ailing mother she will one day have to care for.

The Secret Garden

The beautifully landscaped garden is part of a farm owned by Jason and Rachel Drew. Located literally on the slopes of a rugged mountain, it is filled with large trees, a tumbling stream, outdoor art and an exquisite flower garden. Surrounded by a stone wall (that does nothing to keep the baboons out, on quieter days) and steps away from a dam, it’s an ideal place for a party.

The Drews invited us to join them for an afternoon event they called “Classics in the Garden.” We were welcomed by the classical music of a Hungarian Trio, treated to garlic pizza straight from a stone oven and serenaded by the Gugulewthu Tenors as children cavorted on an inflatable waterslide. Despite the 30-something degree Celsius weather, my skin broke out in gooseflesh as the tenors’ powerful voices sang the South African anthem, something I hadn’t heard in close to 20 years. There was a special energy in the air that day, a feeling of fulfillment, contentment and pure awe at the beauty that surrounded us in the Worcester countryside. I confess, the urge to return to South Africa permanently was particularly strong that day.

Gugulewthu Tenors

It was an extraordinary party, and perhaps not surprisingly, its hosts are extraordinary individuals, too. Walking to the dam for some relief from the excruciating heat, I had a chance to chat with Jason Drew and find out about his work. Passionate about sustainability, he has co-authored a book called The Protein Crunch, in which he discusses resource depletion and environmental destruction of our food sources. Once at the helm of an international call center, he’s given it up to focus entirely on sustainable business. These days his attention is divided between two companies with incredibly unique products: the larvae of farmed flies, and farming of genetically modified mosquitos.

Healthy Flies Mean Healthy Magmeal

A few days later, I interviewed him about the fly farming, which operates under the company AgriProtein. He and his brother David founded the company in the village of Tulbach, South Africa, in 2009 with the goal of reducing and eventually eliminating the use of fishmeal in industrial farming, by replacing it with fly larvae. Using the common house fly and feeding it on waste nutrients that local abattoirs paid them to remove, the Drews set up a fly farming test facility. “We needed to cram the industrialization of fly farming into a few short years and we nearly gave up several times,” says Jason.

There were lots of challenges along the way – like figuring out how to provide water for the flies without drowning them, and getting flies to lay their eggs in one place and at the same time. Fortunately, the growth rate of a fly is explosive, with each one multiplying to over 1,000 in a few weeks. To date, the company has managed to produce sufficient larvae to produce the protein content for a balanced diet of whatever species they want to feed. Turns out magmeal is more nutritious than marine fishmeal, and since the world is fast running out of fishmeal (which escalated in price from $616 per metric ton in 2001 to $1,402 in 2011), it may come in handy. Next up is the construction of an industrial plant that can manufacture the large quantities of magmeal required by the farming industry. The team is looking for investors in South Africa, German and Saudi Arabia.

I know less about Drew’s second company, the UK-based Oxitec. In a nutshell, it uses modern biotechnology to develop insect strains that are sterile and can be used to control pests, such as the aedes mosquitoes that transmit dengue fever. “We’ve developed a genetically modified mosquito,” Jason explained. “When it mates and has offspring, any female offspring will die right away.”

That’s important because it’s the female mosquitoes that bite, and in so doing, transmit dengue fever in some parts of the world. Oxitec is now starting work on the anopheles mosquitoes, responsible for spreading malaria.

I left the Secret Garden feeling awed and inspired – by the garden itself, which is an ode to beauty, by the surrounding peace and tranquility of the Worcester mountains and by the energy, dedication and pure initiative of David Drew, a man determined to make a difference in the world. It was an unforgettable Boxing Day, that’s for sure.