Apples, cherries and pears made out of glass: the fruit production is in full flow here. The place where these magical things are being made is called Island Art Glass run by Rob Adamson on Whibey Island. This is where we are working at the moment. It took us only 5 minutes to show him how we get the glass out of the furnace and work it, to make all of his reservations disappear. We found ourselves put straight into production, working in a good rhythm for eight hours.

To cool off after work, it’s ‘skimboarding’ on the beach. A skimboard is a wooden board roughly 50cmx50cm, which you throw onto flat water, running after it and jumping on. Once you’ve made it on the board, you can enjoy the ride after all this exhausting throwing and running. Skimboarding is much loved here along the west coast; we even know it in Germany. It also works on flooded areas inland as you only need a thin film of water in order to glide. Unfortunately we don’t have any photos of us because as we still make contact with the water too often, it would be too dangerous to carry a camera.

But we do have tonnes of photos of Olympic National Park which we visited at the weekend. We were quite surprised by the gigantic beaches near La Push and the green forest so close to the sea – we really enjoyed the scenery.