VanAussie Daily

We’re going home + Powell River & Vancouver Island Circle Trip

Author: Jared

With the boys now at home and occupying most of my spare time and pretty much 100% of Nat’s time, we’ve realised a couple of things:

1. Having twins with no family support around is rather tough
2. With kids, you can kiss any sort of reliable spare time good by
3. With young babies, getting out of the house takes lots of planning, and longer trips are pretty much out of the question for the time being
4. Those folks who reminisce about the “new baby smell” have glossed over the more pungent memories of sour milk and poop.

SO with the above and a few other things in mind, we’ve decided to head back to Tassie next April (2011). It wasn’t a decision that we took lightly, but in the end it wasn’t that hard – the support and having the kids grow up around their grandparents (free babysitting!) pretty much made up our minds plus the cheaper cost of living available in Tassie. I’ll also be taking my job home with me, so that’s another plus, as there won’t be that horrible job searching part.

In light of all this, there won’t be many exciting trip stories to tell, just burping and pooping stories which you’ll find on the boys blog, plus tidbits from my life around Vancouver. So I’ve decided that to make this blog a more complete memory of our time here in Vancouver, I’m going to go back through all the trips that we’ve done previously and stick them in here for posterity. I hope you enjoy the ride and they inspire some of you to get out and about. My particular favourites are the trips to Oregon, Tofino on Vancouver Island and Nahatlatch, which is in the Fraser Canyon (kinda), about 5 hours east of Vancouver, but we’ve actually been to a surprising amount of places in our time here… enjoy!

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Vancouver – Sunshine Coast – Powell River – Courtenay/Comox – Nanaimo – Vancouver round trip

Looking at that title, that seems like a hell of a lot of places to visit and a fair bit of distance to travel, but we did it all in the space of a weekend not long after we got to Vancouver. Nat’s mother and brother were in town, so we took advantage of the BC Ferries CirclePac which gives you 15% off if you book the four ferries required for this trip at once and we did it all in two days.

I actually think this was a great introduction to the Province and area for us, as when you catch the ferries in BC you get a really great feel for the territory. You’ll see wildlife, wild terrain and some pretty wild people too… but that’s another story. Is this a dog or a cat?!

This was one of those trips where we kept on telling ourselves that we’ll come back soon and spend more time in each of the awesome little places we found.

The first little ferry ride goes from Horseshoe Bay, north west of Vancouver by about 20 minutes, to Gibsons Landing, a quaint little town that actually has quite a lot of Vancouver commuters living in it. The ferry itself takes you through some nice islands and past quite a large waterfall you can see off in the distance.

In what became a bit of a trademark of this trip we headed up the coast road at a reasonable pace in order to make the next ferry on time. We’d booked a cabin just south of Powell River, the most northern town on Powell River, and still had to catch another ferry to get into the general area.

All of this coastal part is called the Sunshine Coast, apparently because it gets more sunshine than Vancouver annually, and lots of folks have their cabins up there. I can certainly see why as it’s a great feeling place, and it’s only accessible by ferry, so it feels quite “islandy” even though it’s attached to the mainland. You get the alternative folks, which makes for a few interesting stores and galleries to visit, but overall it’s just a laid back kinda place.

The next ferry must have been reasonably unremarkable, as I can’t remember it!

Heading up towards Powell River, we found our accommodation, dumped our stuff there, then headed in to town and further up the road to see what we could see. Being that we were on holiday we decided to find a pub for lunch/afternoon beers, and actually found one that was at the foot of a massive, long lake. So long, in fact, that we saw workers being ferried back to town after spending the week out in the woods further up the lake building something or cutting down trees or something.

Also, being that we were on holiday, we couldn’t be bothered doing much after being at the pub, so headed back to the cabin to take in the view and just enjoy hanging out for a bit.

The next morning we rushed to make an early ferry to get a jump on our drive down the island to the next ferry back to Vancouver. Lucky we didn’t stop to scratch, or we would have been left behind, and the next ferry wasn’t for a few hours!

Comox was also fairly uneventful. We spent a little bit of time trying to find the Visitors Information place, only to find that it was essentially a store flogging the wares of the locals and local accommodation, so we decided to head down the winding coast road and see where it lead us. The other choice was the highway, and that can be pretty boring, right?

Again, the whole island atmosphere permeates everything there. It wasn’t quite as laid back as the Sunshine Coast (you can read other things into that name…), but we passed quaint town after quaint town, eventually stopping at a spot for fish and chips on the beach, looking back towards the Sunshine Coast. We even had some sea kayakers for entertainment:

It was about this stage on the highway that I found out the nice roomy ’96 Taurus wagon that we’d purchased only a couple of weeks before only had the first 3 of 4 gears working in the automatic gearbox. Woo hoo, 80k maximum speed on the highway folks! F$%#ing used car sales guys… this was the start of a slippery slope in that car, as although we didn’t actually pay for any major repairs we did realise that it was an absolute POS and typical of north american vehicle design… anyhoo, rant over, we soldiered on with it for another 12 months before selling it for $500 and a couple of cartons of beer and buying a Toyota 4Runner. Much better!

/tangent

Heading for Nanaimo and the ferry again, we managed to strike it lucky once again, being one of the last people on the boat. We’re the wagon in the middle right. That’s right, the poo brown one. We called it the Prawn.

Sometimes, if you’re lucky, you’ll get to see whales and dolphins from the ferry. We didn’t get to see any on this trip, but it was still a great, if rushed, trip. If I did it again, I would probably skip Vancouver Island and just spend more time on the Sunshine Coast, as there was certainly lots of things to do and places to see to keep us occupied for much longer than just a weekend. Maybe next time!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 25th, 2010 at 10:16 pm and is filed under In and around BC, Previous trips (memory lane), scenery, travel, Twins. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.