these are not my walls

I went to Saltspring (or, if you prefer, Salt Spring) Island on Tuesday. Not for vacation - although it is a great vacation spot - but for work. Once a month they have criminal courts at the Ganges courthouse, so everyone - lawyers, judge, sheriff, court clerks - ferries over from Vancouver Island and we hold court for a day.

Usually, as quickly as possible, so everyone can catch the earliest possible ferry home. :)

Anyway, I went with a senior Crown a couple of times as an articled student, and this time I went as *the* Crown, and brought our current articled student with me. Which is kind of hilarious - I am in no way senior enough to be supervising some poor student - but the list was really short, and we didn't think anything much was going to happen, so no big deal.

I picked him up on the way to the 9 a.m. ferry, we hopped over on a short 35-minute ferry ride, and made good time on the 14 km drive to the courthouse. We were there in plenty of time for the 10 a.m. start time (and, in fact, beat the judge - who'd been on our same ferry.)

This is basically what Saltspring looked like when we got there:



Only a little less sunny.

We hold court, it only goes for about 2 1/2 hours - there'd been one trial scheduled, but defence counsel successfully applied for an adjournment - and then we exit the courthouse for the drive back to the ferry.

This is basically what Saltspring looked like when we got out of the courthouse:



And that's only a slight exaggeration (though it is a picture taken by someone else, of somewhere else.) Also, what that latter photo doesn't show is that the snow was still falling. And the snow on the highway was fresher.

Yeah. We were in my little Echo, with it's worn-out-and-to-be-replaced-as-soon-as-the-new-ones-we-ordered-arrive all season tires.

Which wouldn't really be *that* much of a problem - go slow, don't slam on the brakes - except for three things:

1) Saltspring is not exactly flat.





2) Saltspring has no sand or salt trucks, at least not that we are aware of. We did see two trucks go by with what were likely intended to be snow plows on the front, but the plows were at least 2 - 3" off the ground, and had no discernible impact on the precipitation on the road.

3) There were lots of other cars on the road, driven by people who (also) had no real idea what they were doing. So the go slow, no stopping thing was kind of problematic. And there were people riding our ass.

The articled student had to get out and push a van that was almost sideways on the road at one point, and finally got her going - just long enough for her to slide sideways a few hundred metres later, causing me to have to hit the brakes (too hard, dammit!) and slide sideways ourselves. Unlike the van driver, I steered into the skid, so we ended up on part of the shoulder and not actually in the ditch.

At which point I made our articled student drive. Did I mention he grew up in NWT? Yeah.

45 minutes after leaving the courthouse, he got us safely into the ferry terminal - not a scratch or dent on the car, and I only had to get out (in my suit!) and push us up over one hill - and my muscles slowly started to de-clench from their adrenaline-fuelled lockdown.

Yeah, still not a big fan of driving in slidey snow. Man, you flip one truck off one snow highway, and it lives in your psyche forever!

We caught an early enough ferry that we could've gone into the office when we made it back to (completely snow-free) Victoria, but we both said fuck it. I mean, really; we'd put in a full day's work, I think.

I went home and went to bed. :)