Advertisement
Published: February 13th 2010
Edit Blog Post
Day 6 - Tues Feb 9th
An early start this morning at 6am - urgh, wasn't this travelling lark supposed to be relaxed! A variety of transport modes - a sky train, a bus, a ferry, a long walk with our backpacks and finally a hire car and we arrived in Victoria on Vancouver Island. Jake had to get used to driving an automatic car on the wrong side of the road. We are used to this from Germany, but here, in an American car you obviously have to sit on the other side of the car, which was weird. Also, one observation with the roads here is that when you come to traffic lights and want to turn right, you can do so if there are no cars coming even if the lights are red!! We think this is great, but feel naughty every time we do it!
The hotel where we are staying is good, we appear to be getting half price compared to the standard rates and even have breakfast included which we weren't expecting. It is right on the harbour, so you can see the boats and seaplanes coming and going each day.
We
had a wander round the high street and then being cold, hungry and starting to get a bit grumpy, we started the search for food. Being on a budget this was a bit tricky, as food prices here are generally higher than we want to pay. We went to find the local fish and chip shop, but it was closed, so we ended up in the hotel's sports bar watching ice hockey (what else?) and as it was wings night, we thought it rude not to sample some bbq wings washed down with a small jug of beer and some pop. Can you guess who had which?!!
Day 7 - Wed Feb 10th
Although breakfast is included in our room price we discovered that it is not that vast, unless you want to pay extra, so saving our pennies we had our measley juice & bagels and headed for the supermarket to top up. We had picked up a map from the tourist information place for an area called East Sooke National Park and decided to visit this today to do a coastal walk. It was raining a bit, which made the path a bit muddy and slippery.
It also didn't help that the path in some places is not very well marked, so we ended up scrabbling up and down some rocks to get where we wanted to! We did a 2hour hike and then returned to the car for an indoor picnic.
Next stop was supposed to be Sooke Pot Holes, which had been suggested by the tourist information place, but on arriving we discovered that the pot holes were meant to be for swimming in and as we didn't fancy a freezing cold dip we decided to give a further walk a miss and headed back to the hotel via a liquor store.
Day 8 - Thurs Feb 11th
I am allowed to put my first entry in yes folks it's Jake and his beard here !
Well where do I start
We got up around eight this morning and I have discovered I have an addiction to coffee now as well as looking in the mirror to see how long my beard has got in the last 9 hours. Bad news, its not much longer, at least I have given up smoking I suppose. Well we headed off for
a muffin and more coffee in the breakfast room then packed our bags and headed off towards Sooke. Our aim was to head further up the coast this time and the weather was not dampening our spirits. We ended up driving for about 2 hours on what is supposed to be a wonderful scenic drive to Port Renfrew but in actual fact it was a rollercoaster ride with broken roads and pot holes everywhere from the log truckers and the severe weather. We did stop at French Beach and had a walk along for about an hour. It was full of trees that had been washed up and also massive 4-5 metre wide roots of trees very surreal to see but you got an idea that the sea changes on this part of the Island. Still it was all new so we enjoyed it for a while. We eventually got to Botanical Bay which is just outside Port Renfrew and took a small hike for 2.5km on a loop to the beach and bay. The one thing you notice is the sound of the waves crashing against the rocks and what I can only describe as thunder as the waves
turned over when you pull your car up to park. We headed down closer and I could have stayed there for hours just watching the waves it's just pure anger in the sea. The one thing you do see a lot of is signs stating "warning rogue waves" and they don't make this up after we headed off the beach a large wave covered an area I had been standing just 5 minutes earlier. Scary stuff! Well after this we had had enough of the heavy rain which was here to stay and headed back to Victoria where we went to a local restaurant and ate far too much then it was time to relax in front of the tv and watch ice hockey. Good Times!!
Day 9 - Friday Feb 12th
More heavy rain to annoy us and today it has hampered our spirits but we were heading to our next hotel for 2 nights back up in Nanaimo called the Buccaneer Inn. By about my 3rd coffee we headed off to Sidney looking at some of the properties around Victoria which all have an English resemblance in one way or another. Not a great deal to
do as the weather was actually appalling 70 knot winds and heavy rain only made short walks possible. The good news was that we had found something that was affordable in Canada and that is petrol at around 50p a litre it sure makes a difference. We headed off from Sidney after walking on the pier and running back to the car before we got drenched to Lake Cowichan which was just off our route back up to Nanaimo. On arriving we got lost and ended up driving on more awful tracks before reaching the lake which was covered by clouds and decided to have lunch in the car before heading to the hotel. A shame really as you can see that it must be a stunning place in the summer or even on a clear day. Well we have arrived at our Hotel which is lovely a nice spacious apartment with cooking facilities and a cozy front room. The plan is to cook some food and have a couple of cold beers and watch the opening ceremony of the Olympics!
One weird thing we noticed in the local supermarket was at the till the cashier person changed over and
the new one, instead of adjusting the height of their seat as you may see in the UK, they adjusted the height of the whole till unit - very bizarre!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.1s; Tpl: 0.013s; cc: 15; qc: 60; dbt: 0.0527s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.1mb
peter webster
non-member comment
vancouver island
Hope you can save your blog and make it into a book or even turn it into a feature for a travel section. I did warn about expensive canada and the only cheap thing was fuel but then our 3 litre v6 campervan only did 15mpg