Hi – welcome to my new blog! Since blogs are the way to communicate nowadays, it’s time I joined in. The ExploreNorth Blog will be the more casual, more-often-written version of Explorenorth’s email newsletter, with much more than just notes about Web site updates. With Spring just now arriving in a serious way, there's a whole lot going on in my world, and this will be where you can read about it if such things interest you. To some degree this is also a training exercise for me, as my writing has suffered over the past couple of years due to having too much happening that distracts me.

This past weekend, I took a judo club down to Prince George, BC, in the charter bus that I've been driving for the past few years. I love traveling, but it's become too disruptive, so I'm retiring from bus driving in August. The Prince George trip was the last sports charter I'll be doing (the people were great, though). There isn't a whole lot to do in Prince George in the Spring, but we got lucky and had fabulous weather, so after a short visit to the beautiful art gallery on Saturday, I walked several miles around downtown, the railyards and Cottonwood Park. A new Lions charity program is resulting in 7-foot-high fiberglass "Spirit Bears," each decorated by a different local artist, being installed in several communities around BC – see SpiritBearsintheCity.com for information. I found 6 of the 7 installed in Prince George so far (there will be 14 in Prince George within the next few weeks). I really enjoy trains, and the highway bridge to Cottonwood Park offered a great bird's eye view (click on the photo to enlarge it).