A Place To Put On The List...

This past weekend Meg and I made a whirlwind road trip from Vancouver east into the mountains of south-eastern British Columbia to the lovely town of Nelson and back. We went to the Kootneys for the wedding celebration of our friends Carmen Stephen and Nilesh Patel who decided to have their ceremony in the "Jewel of the Kootneys" in order to collect friends and family from far and wide... The wedding itself was a beautiful and unique combination of an East Indian ceremony and a Western Civil ceremony at a large mansion (built ages ago by some big mining executive so-and-so) overlooking Kootney Lake. It was a lot of fun to see my beautiful Megcita dressed up in a sari for the ceremony. It really suited her well! And I had a fun time running around with a video camera as a favour to the groom. Nelson has a bit of a history as a "hippie town" now as a result of being the small town of choice for American "draft dodgers" wishing to "disappear into the woodwork" in British Columbia during the Vietnam War era. They went to hide from "the man," work at the mill, and grow pot. They are still there, and still growing pot, though the mill has disappeared in favour of a booming tourist trade (which looks very good on the area incidentally, in both summer and winter high seasons). Nelson is more posh now than in days of old I imagine. You can get a proper cafe there now, organically grown and fair traded beans of course, and not just diner food for lunch. There is a decent Mexican food restaurant and a funky place called "The Preserved Seed" which uniquely offers food prepared exclusively with raw ingredients grown on their own farm. Ridiculous, of course, when there is such great organic produce in the area, but amazing nonetheless. And not a fast food chain in site! Yeah! The town is gentrifying as word of its "higher than average sophistication for a small town" gets out, but it is still a very laid back feeling place despite the new influx of cash. And it still suffers from that slightly depressed feeling of a place where legitimate and continual jobs are few and far between. As well, the "hippies" have changed a lot and now can be more accurately described as ski or mountain bike bumbs, no-ambition potheads, and people "finding themselves" while sampling the historical significance of the place rather than the challenging folks of the past. That being said, I would far rather spend my holiday time with the delightfully deluded than the redneck infantry so common in more off the beaten path areas of the province, and the average Nelson-er seemed to me to be a very genuine, slow moving, and happy type who made us feel very welcome. Fine by me! Meg and I nearly instantly began to speak about coming back up there next summer to spend a little more time in the area. Perhaps we too will become part of the growing trend soaking up what Nelson has to offer on a somewhat annual basis... for better or worse as I am sure the locals will say.