Gabriola Island Lifestyle Blog

Excited to go, but sad to leave. With mornings like this and days to match it is no wonder my husband and I leave with a bit of regret. Not to mention time spent away from our family and sweet grand children. But we have places to see and a finite number of years left to see them. This year we are planning a slow trip down the Colorado River camping at the numerous state and regional parks, then wintering deep in the California desert. We will be back by spring and I will be refreshed and ready to rejoin my lovely partners (my daughters, Robyn and Carly) in the real estate business, giving them some time to spend with their families.

We are ready to go. We are pointed in the right direction. In the morning we will start out on our journey to the desert. While we won’t really miss the winter we will miss our grandchildren, but adventure calls to us. We anticipate the quiet open spaces and many wonderful hikes. We’ll be back by spring, rejuvenated by our winter away.

Every year by December my husband and I are dreaming of blue skies and warm lazy days in an empty desert. Perhaps this is not your definition of paradise but for us it works. We adore the desert and thrive on the quiet and slow pace of life, spending many hours hiking and biking. Some may think that there is nothing in the desert, but that is simply not true. We saw rabbits, coyote, desert squirrels, long horn sheep, lizards, beetles and lots of birds. Even the dryest of deserts have many types of plants and some desert is actually quite lush with palms and small springs.

This year we found that north of the Mexican border only the low desert in California offered the warmth that we so crave without having to drive too far. The coast, the high desert and Arizona were not much warmer than Gabriola Island so we spent 10 weeks exploring Death Valley National Park and the Anza Borrego Desert State Park. Both are quite beautiful, sunny, dry and warm with wonderful hiking, fantastic geology and interesting history, plus with all the rain this year (yes, we had a few wet days) there were lots of wild flowers and the cactus were starting bloom.

We would have loved to stay until spring and seen the desert in full bloom but my partners called me back, “the real estate market on Gabriola is starting to heat up and we need your help!”

So I’m back on Gabriola Island and back to work – now we are dreaming of spring, summer and fall in this paradise.