Pickin' berries on the first day that I've "felt" retired

[Okanagan]

On July 1 I left my management job in an office and sometime in August will begin again on a part time basis mostly from a laptop.  Yet today, July 24 is the first day that it felt like a real change.

Drove out to the Fraser River to check water level at a place I want to take grandsons next week, and came across a young man with three kids on an old John Deere pick-up bed 3 wheeler stuck in sand and gravel.   He had a strap of nylon climbing webbing, easy to pull them out.  One little girl turned 6 today she told me.

I moved on a few hundred yards and started picking the first blackberries I've seen ripe this year.  My wife likes them on cereal and I picked a half gallon.   The fellow with kids came by and he asked if I knew of the Yellow Deli in Chilliwack.  I didn't but he said he was part owner, and to stop by there and tell them Orlando said to give me a free beverage. 

Back closer to the pavement I stopped and picked a few more black berries and took the pics below.  A couple of years ago I watched a guide and client land a 6 foot sturgeon in a boat 30 feet off the cut bank to the river below the berry bushes.  These are the big Himalaya blackberries that have taken over the northwest, not the better tasting small wild native variety.

[coyote101]

Those berries sure look good.  I got eaten up by chiggers many times picking blackberries when I was a kid. 

Pat

[Okanagan]

Chiggers are horrible!  Fortunately, we don't have chiggers in this neck of the woods, nor any poisonous snakes to watch out for in berry bushes.  Just bears...      (which I will take over chiggers any day!)

[Hawks Feather]

Neither bears nor bugs sound good to me.

Jerry

[nailbender]

 Congrats on your retirement!  Still have a few years of tired to go here.

[FinsnFur]

The berries dont do much for me, but I would LOOOVE to be in the background slinging some line over that river.

[HaMeR]

Blackberry cobbler on the vine is what I see!!!!!!!!   

Glad you're out having a heckuva good time Ok!! Now get those berries back to the kitchen!!!!!!