Our younger son has gone off again on one of his extended weekend trips. As a biologist living in British Columbia the opportunities for him to go off on such trips into the wilderness areas an easy drive from Vancouver are numerous and he takes advantage of them in every season.

Two weeks ago he was on a kayaking camping trip to Saturna Island in the Gulf islands chain off Vancouver. He knows how much I love to see photographs of his trips. There was a time when his father and I appeared in some of those photographs. After our trip with him canoeing the Bowron Lakes circuit and visiting the old growth forest at Chilliwack, we've never been back to Vancouver.

We'd experienced what it's like to camp with him on multiple occasions on canoe-portage trips to Algonquin Park but Bowron Lakes was vastly different. As was our experience backpacking on a mountain. We're too old to even consider such things any longer, though two years ago we did go canoe-camping with him at Algonquin Park; the last time we visited the Park, as well.

Now he's off again this past weekend, this time backpacking not far from the Stein Valley, an area he really favours, and one we became familiar with when years ago we did the same thing with him. He downloads the photographs he takes to Dropbox, and through that medium we're able to share-in-absence-proxy what he has seen on his never-ending trips.