Heading South Again, Take Two!

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Today we are starting our long trek south (again), first stop Victoria! We continue to have fabulous weather and this morning was no exception - the sky was blue with hardly a cloud, it warmed up pretty quickly and we didn’t have to wear coats! To give you an idea, the people in the cabin next door left with running shorts on… We are just hoping that by making this comment we aren’t jinxing the rest of the trip!

Statistics

Starting Destination: Ucluelet, British Columbia, Canada
Ending Destination: Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Ending Destination GPS: N: 48° 25.295’ W: 123° 22.388’ Elev: 36’ (at the dock, due to technical difficulties)
Miles Driven: 255.6
Distance Walked: 3.8 km (2.4 miles)
Stairs Climbed: 250

The First Enigma

After packing the truck - we are getting rather good at this!! We looked at the beach across the road, oh what a difference a few days make! With the blue sky the beach across the road looked totally difference than when we arrived. Before leaving town we thought we should investigate the port and the local marina - there was some difference between the boats at the port and those at the marina; the ones at the marina were far more photogenic! There was practically no wind, which made for some interesting reflections of the boats - note the big boat, we are not exactly sure how they would get this one out of the harbor, perhaps it is just parked waiting for a storm or a really high tide? We were guessing that it is mostly for effect and the company uses the little boats that are moored on the other side!
Just up the street from the marina was the source of our first enigma—see the picture left. That would be a pretty big “fig leaf” if you wanted to add it to your wardrobe - perhaps you would need both a belt and suspenders?!

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One last Chance to Slip and Slide

The weather was so nice that we decided to take one more walk in the park - from the main road we turned down Willowbrae Road, more like Willowbrae track and this turned into the trail. Maria found it very interesting that this trail was once the main thoroughfare between Ucluelet and Tofino - the trip took 2 days, until the first road was installed in 1942… The information sign said there was evidence of old homesteads along the route, in that there were “clearer” areas where the trees weren’t so high and the undergrowth wasn’t so thick—these were rather more difficult to find than we thought. Although we did see evidence of where early loggers had chopped support holes for the spring boards they used to get further up the tree. Maria remembers seeing this technique in action at the Adelaide Show (kind of like State Fair) when she was a kid, except the trees were nowhere near as big!! Carl said “haven’t you seen this in the Outdoor Games on ESPN?” Obviously not!! The track ended kind of abruptly at the beach as there was quite a drop from the last step to the sand. We explored for a while and found evidence that previous visitors had created shelters (one for the people and one for the dog) on the beach and even the remains of distant camp fires. Carl thought about writing a message in the sand for the sea to take to all of our readers, but he wasn’t quite sure how it would get to Kansas!! Alas, our trip to the Pacific Rim National Park was coming to a close - all we had to do was brave the roller-coaster road back!...

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Retracing our Steps

A few weeks ago Maria said to Carl “It’s a good thing we didn’t institute a ‘no backtracking’ rule on this trip or we would be sunk!” Well today we would have well and truly been sunk as there is only one road in and out from Port Alberni to Tofino. From Port Alberni there are some gravel roads that cut through the center of the island but we thought we had better play it safe and not take them so we backtracked almost the whole way!! Thankfully the sights almost always look different from the other direction… We managed to negotiate our way through the roller coaster section (primarily due to the fact that most of the cars were going the other way) and the fog, well we think it was fog, it looked kind of pink but there was no source of fire that we could see. However, we had to stop and catch our breath in Port Alberni, where we drove down to the dock and ate lunch with a view of the sea—yes we were surprised, the sea actually comes quite a ways inland at that point of the island. There is even a ferry to Ucluelet from Port Alberni; we wondered whether it took cars!!
Our next stop was Cathedral Grove within the MacMillan Provincial Park, where we were able to walk amongst a stand of old Douglas Fir Trees, some were nearly 800 years old, but most were only 300 due to a fire… However, they were still pretty big!! We also tried to notice some of the smaller plants - there were quite a few interesting types of mushrooms (ok, mushrooms are not plants) hiding under bigger leaves! Once back on the main road there was not much to see, Maria was looking for the nursery which had flowers growing in the gutters, but we only saw a pub with grass growing on the roof - obviously we didn’t retrace our steps 100%!!(MISSING) We were also looking for a local fruit stand after we missed one on the road, unfortunately it must have been the only one as we didn’t find any - probably a good thing as US customs might not have liked us very much. There were also a couple of other sites that we might have stopped at, had they been open - many, it seems are closed for the winter… We were thinking - if this is winter, then we don’t know why they are closed; but lets not tempt the weather too much!! One of the last enigmas for the day was the name of the snow capped peak we could see from the road - of course, all the lookouts we had passed on the way north were now on the wrong side of the road with no way to get to them. Thankfully, this didn’t remain an enigma for long.

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Fish and Chips for Tea

We made it back to Victoria in one piece… Our next mission, to find somewhere to stay - not too close to town (where you would have to pay for parking), but also not too far out… We had seen some bike trails on the map and were hoping to experience some of them tomorrow before taking the ferry, but we didn’t want to be too far from the ferry. We were also looking forward to having Fish and Chips for dinner, so something that combined all three would be perfect! Well, we lucked out - something close enough to have free parking, close enough to the ferry (see tomorrow’s blog for the full story) and just across the road from an “authentic” (or so says the sign) Fish and Chip Shop. We can’t comment on the “authentic,” as neither Maria nor Carl really took notes when they had been in the UK - but it sure did taste good!!

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Carl’s Travel Trivia

Yesterday’s Answer: 1942
Today’s Question: How big is the largest tree in Cathedral Grove (Hint: Carl is 6 feet tall)

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