Holiday blog: This is a place where grandmothers hold babies on theirlaps under the stars...

and whisper in their ears that the lights in the sky are holes in the floor of heaven.

With thanks to Rick Bragg for the quotation.

We were in such a place last night. It was magical.

I was feeling a bit on the weepy side when we set out until I realised that my mind thought it was 4 a.m. and what on earth was I thinking of going on a hike to Lake Cheakamus when, by rights, I should be tucked up in bed? 

Six kilometres up a dusty pot-holed mountain track and our once-white hire car was thinking the same thing.

But then...

but then, we started walking, me and Pete, Irene and her mum, Serena, and Laurie, carrying Baby Matilda, three weeks old, in a wraparound sling.

We walked through an ancient forest beside a fast-flowing river of unimaginable blue-green tumbling beauty and the air smelled of pine resin and my heart over-flowed with peace and joy and my mind forgot about time zones and knew that nothing in life was as important as this.

Most of all, when three generations of Coxon-Rankin women - me and Serena, and Irene, breast-feeding Matilda, sat on a log over the lake at sunset, drinking in the beauty and the sheer joy of being together.