Vancouver Island is beautiful, especially once you start moving away from the strait and venture closer towards the coast of the Pacific. Wild berries, eagles, seals, crashing ocean waves, water worn pebbles, the sound of gulls riding a current and the fresh scent of fir and pine. Magnificent! It's as if all the quintessence of the northwest has somehow been condensed and put on display for all to see and experience in one spot - which really, if you think about it, is what transforms a location into a locale, particularly one visitors might desire to visit. The lure of such imagined Northwestiness was too strong to resist, especially for two Northwesterners, and even when our actual experiences failed to align with our anticipated ones, the lovely thing about memory is that you can conveniently neglect
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