Salt Spring Island

And now more from the "I ate raspberry jam on toast for breakfast. The jam has quite a few seeds" school of blogging! That's right!A torrid, soul skeweringly boring post about real life stuff!

The family all piled into the hatchback and took a vacation to Salt Spring Island this past weekend. It's a somewhat large island off the west coast of BC. Google it. No, not that link, don't be disgusting. Don't you google with adult filters ON? What's wrong with you?

Salt Spring is everything you think West Coast is. Yoga, crystals, chakras, a pottery studio on every corner. Their weekend open market is colossal and confusing. Who knew there was such a demand for lavender based products? Or overpriced ultra-organic beets? Looking around, you see that tie-dye is not worn ironically, and apparently MANY MANY white people like dreadlocks. Or hate bathing. Or, both, actually.

There is also another side. The OBSCENELY RICH. The ocean side houses run around 2-3 MILLION. Not a stone throws away from some old tear down that a Cultural Anthropology Grad student is using for a hemp clothing store and LSD ReImagineering Factory. Sure, there are Honda Civics from 1983, but there are also exotic cars that are named like fringe Italian porn stars. The women are botoxed and lifted and implanted, The men have that ruddy look you only get by spending all your free time sipping dry martinis on yacht decks discussing the S&P 500 and monetary policy.

And, in a weird twist of 'rising tide lifts all boats' economic theory, everything is pretty damned expensive for a sleepy little island where every industry can be rightfully prefixed with the word 'cottage'. There's gelato there for crying out loud. Small seaside towns should have either a Dairy Queen built from the hopes and dreams of newly impregnated beauty queens, or a corner store that doesn't serve ice cream per-se, but a frozen muck with 1005% the daily recommended intake of Xnyoxy-tri-methyl-dihydride 2,3-di-phenyl percolate that's called 'soft serve'.

In some ways, it's a perfect match: the craftsmen who don't like anything unless it's handmade with artisanal attention to detail; and the jet-setting elite who are willing to pay for that craftsmanship.