A CANNY GOOD READ!

The Downtown Vancouver Skyline

Long time since the last post - about 3 weeks or more I think. Myself and Brian are now settled into our New Apartment. We now have a steady internet connection and thus it is posting time.

It has now been 5 weeks today that we packed up the wheels and hit the open Canadian roads for the west coast, cant believe that its been so long - doesn't feel like it.

For the first 3 weeks we were holed up in a hotel. At first I was like "yeah hotels are awesome, its like a vacation" but after the 3 weeks It was starting to get pretty shitty. We couldn't cook anything for ourselves, all our stuff was jammed into a corner and stacked up, no clothes were unpacked etc. We were eating out pretty much every night. Our new apartment is a basement suite located in Lynn Valley, North Vancouver. There are mountain bike trails just up the road, a mall with all the stores we need just down the road. There are 3 ski hills within 20 minute drives and golf courses close by too.

The past week we have visited IKEA 3 times (my first ventures to this Swedish creation). I knew Ikea sold furniture but I had no idea that the store was monstrous - this thing was about the same size as a mall.

As you knew I had a job working on a big Highway project. Brian now also has a job with the same company as I do but just a different project (he is working on a power plant in the jungle a bit further north of Vancouver). I have been working for 3 weeks now, with my day starting at 6am each day (5am I wake up) and then I usually finish around 530-6ish. The first week of work was relatively slow - it consisted of orientation style activities and office work. Since then I have started to get out onto the field more and more. This past week I have been assigned to the Drill and Blast Squadron. It is our job to blow up the rock, drill the rock and then install and grout any rock anchors that are used to hold concrete retaining walls to the bedrock (all fun stuff). It is quite a lot different from what I am used to, my previous job consisted of producing building plans and performing design calculations. This job involves equipping myself with steel toe boots, hard hat and then storming around a job site. We are in charge of Drilling, Installing, Grouting and then Testing all the rock anchors within our job segment. This segnemt of the highway (Segment 2) has the most anchors of the project - 3600 in total. There are lots of opportunities to do things I haven't done before and it is a different learning experience to that of the office. For instance last thursday there was a situation where we had to install some anchors on the face of the mountain thus someone needed to be tied off just to help guide them in. Taking the training course in this I jumped at the opportunity. I was strapped into a harness, tied off and then dangled over the mountain edge to help feel the rock anchor into the drill hole, it was all cliffhanger and shit.

A conc. retaining wall with all the Rock Anchors sticking out from its face.

The Rock Anchor Kubota - a 4 wheel drive golf cart (45km/h downhill = raw power)