(posted via iPhone) We’re still in Tofino, enjoying the last throes of this, our final expedition of a summer that has been blessedly full of them. Yesterday, after watching the kids try in earnest to dig to China and a healthy twirl through the skateboard park, we spent hours at the beachfront cabin of a friend enjoying a marvellous spread of barbecued spot prawns, freshly shucked oysters, beach-fire smoked chicken, sweet corn, addictive flatbread, local sockeye, cold beer and crisp wine. This was followed by a game of “Welfare Skeet Shooting”, a very sporting endeavour that sees one person throwing up a large rock and the rest trying to boozily pick it off in mid-flight with stones of their own to giggled yells of “pull!” (despite a few close calls, no one was injured). Sated and long-shadowed, we then went on a seriously tripped-out jaunt through the Botanical Gardens for this small but always enthusiastic town’s annual Lantern Festival. The citizenry really get deep into it with costumes, stunning mobiles that look as if they’re about to burst into dangerous flames, and enough rolled and aromatic recreational fun tubes to steer a herd of elephants into forgetting where they put their trunks. Today, everyone in my party is either going surfing, kayaking or engaging in something called yoga, which leaves me largely alone at our beach camp to drink hot coffee and write by an omnipresent fire that seems to have an appetite equal to my own. The weather, which has been drearily reported since we arrived, dawned mercifully wrong once again. The sand is warm and the crows are well-fed in a blue sky that is, at noon, nearly free of clouds. Beyond them, oppressive billions of stars float in waiting. When they pop for this one last time, we will quietly obscure them with our smoke, drinking long and happy and smelling of the place we loathe to bid goodbye.