Western Dreamz TripLog
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Saturday July 17, 2004 - "Caution: Antarctic Racing Kangaroos"
As I write this, we just stopped at a rest stop where I used a "Phoenix Composting Toilet" in a "Family Washroom" (don't all families crap together)? The sign asked me to "Please help it do its job while you do yours", my job being to shit, and its job clearly being to eat my shit. Oops... I meant to say earmuffs there. Anyhow, since Nelson was overflowing with festival traffic, we decided to keep heading West this morning (possibly hitting Nelson again on the way back through). Our route to the coast followed highway 3 to Hope (where we stopped tonight), and then back onto the Trans-Canada for the final stretch tomorrow. Today's drive was really great. The weather was hot and sunny the whole way. We were just being cooked in the car, but it was a GOOD cookin'. This stretch of highway weaves up and down through mountains and valleys, and curves north and south, dipping within kilometres of the US border at times. One really unusual place was Osoyoos, which was basically a desert. On the map, you see a squiggly approach via highway which turns out to be a really steep descent into a dry sandy valley, the bottom of which contains Canada's warmest lake. This area gets very little rainfall, and has a bunch of cacti, snakes, and other desert-dwellers not found anywhere else in the country. All of the ground cover we saw was the kind of sagebrush type shrubs you see in western movies (and they probably "tumble" when autumn rolls around). We stopped at the lake to cool off, and it was a decent swimming place, though busy. They had floating docks and platforms built at the public beach so you could swim out to them and dive... a nice touch. After Osoyoos we kept trucking toward hope, a drive which took us through Manning Provincial Park. We'd planned on stopping at one of the campgrounds within the park (it's a huge park with the highway cutting through the centre), but they were either too full or too ugly. It seemed like they found the least treed areas and built campgrounds in them. So we gave up on Manning and decided to get a little closer to Hope (cutting our Drive time to Vancouver tomorrow as a bonus). Just before Hope, we stopped at the 'Hope Slide', which is the site of a huge landslide that happened in the sixties. Apparently there were a couple of snowslides on the highway causing three cars to stop. A little while later a small earthquake caused the mountain nearby to fall into the valley, completely filling a lake and forcing all of the water up the sides of the valley, taking a bunch of dirt and trees with it, not to mention the four people and their three cars (they were all killed). Now the highway goes around the spot which is still just filled with huge chunks of rock and mountain. Later that year, a guy crashed a plane into the mountain. Then an air force plane also crashed into the same mountain a few years later, causing me to rename it "Bad Luck Mountain". Tonight we stayed at Silver Lake Provincial Park and got the VERY LAST SITE in the campground. THe site was a double site (again), meaning it's one big site with two fire pits. When we pulled in, we saw that our neighbours were three guys in a big pickup pulling an ATV on a trailer, who'd tied their rottweiler up to a nearby tree. Worried we'd be eaten in our sleep by the dog we reluctantly pulled in and started to set up. We got to talking to the guys next door, and they turned out to be really nice guys from the Vancouver area, and their dog's temperament matched their own (very friendly). One interesting character from that site was "Matt from Chilliwack", who came across the lane to make friends with us since it appeared that he did not get along with the people he was camping with. There were two kids with him as well (good kids too), whom he was swearing like mad in front of (at the same time that he told us he doesn't like to swear in front of the kids). He even had them fetching beer for him which was pretty interesting to watch. When he got the kids to fetch his cooler for him, we knew he wanted to talk to us all night, so we moved to the neighbour's campfire as soon as we had a chance. We got a lot of tips from them about Vancouver and the Island, which we promptly forgot since we wrote none of it down. Unfortunately they were gone in the morning when we were going to ask them to repeat some of it so that we could jot it down. It was a worthwhile meeting nonetheless.
Sunday July 18, 2004 - "The Day We Hit The Coast"
Today was INTENSE. We left Hope at a reasonable time, finally ferry-bound, ready to take on Tofino by way of Vancouver. The drive started with traffic. Apparently there was a huge music festival in Merrit (I think) which drew something like 150,000 people, all of whom were driving to Vancouver at the same time as us. So we ducked off the highway for some bathroom and coffee action and short-cut it through the city, where we found internet (of course) and stopped at Mountain Equipment Co Op for some essentials. It was still relatively early so we decided to take a drive around Stanley Park (not wanting to pay to stop the car) before heading to the ferry terminal. I have to say, the park is amazing -- a lot bigger than I remember it from when I was eight years old (at which time I probably assumed that the "park" was the small grassy area where we had happened to stop the car). Next time around it will probably be worth spending time there. Today though, our priority was to NOT miss the ferry. So we headed over the Lion's Gate bridge toward the ferry. Not only did we not miss the ferry, but we also did not miss the three hour lineup to get on. As we followed the highway, a portable electronic construction sign told us to "use the shoulder" if we were ferry traffic. As we rounded the corner we saw the lineup we had to join, down the shoulder of the highway, a couple of kilometres long. After a short wait, a guy came down and gave us a numbered card (#892) and told us we'd likely be on the six o'clock. It was 3:45. A long wait later we finally made it into the actual ferry lineup within the ferry dock parking lot and commenced waiting some more. We did get on the 6pm ferry, but it left about 30-40 minutes late, putting our total wait time to almost three hours. Once on the ferry, we took a walk around the upper decks and stopped at the bow (that's the front) where we saw a guy sitting playing the mandolin and being grubby. With his ripped shirt and bare feet, we figured he was being paid for ambience purposes. We started talking to him (actually, he started talking to us) after he overheard us discussing Tofino. It turns out his name was Jesse, he was in Vancouver for the weekend, was living in Tofino for the summer, and needed a ride there. One problem with the car in it's current state however, is that there is NO passenger room. After chatting for a majority of the (2 hour) ferry ride and teaching him Gin and Juice on the mandolin, we told him we'd try to shuffle some crap to fit him in, and successfully did so (with barely enough room for him to sit... and the added bonus of food falling onto him through each left turn). The first hilight of the drive from Nanaimo to Tofino was an awesome old van with a sign telling us to 'honk if you're horny', to which we gladly honked and received what appeared to be a quick flashing, however none of us could see for sure (no really, we couldn't!) The second, third and fourth highlights were the three Tim Horton's' [Tim Hortonzez] within 5 minutes -- the highest concentration we've seen since we left Hamilton. Then we were treated to a Canadian Tire and a Future Shop (the first FS we've seen in all our travels). Additionally, the freeways on the island are jacked up to 110 km/h which of course rocks. And that was all before we left the limits of Nanaimo! One stretch of the road runs through Cathedral Grove, where the huge trees are so close to the road that the pavement touches their trunks in some parts and there's no shoulder. The rest of the drive was also great. In addition to more Tims and CTs, the road was extremely hilly, winding through the interior mountains of the island. Because we had to drive slowly through some rain and fog, it turned out to be about a three hour drive to Tofino from Nanaimo (putting us into town after eleven). When we got there, we expected the worst in terms of accommodations, and we were right. We had tried to reserve a camping spot from the ferry lineup earlier in the day, but the Provincial Parks offices were closed. We would have stopped before Tofino (and before dark), however we promised Jesse a ride home. So he gave us some tips about the town (including an amazing hike as well as an awesome show that was coming on Wednesday) and we dropped him off. We then headed back out of town to find camping at one of the private campgrounds. We found one with a few vacancies and set the tent up in the rain... and set the tarp up in the rain... and cooked and ate dinner in the rain... at midnight. Needless to say, it was not one of the better camping experiences, but that's what you get when you show up in a rainforest at midnight to go camping. To add insult to injury, they wanted $29 for the site (the most expensive site we had hit yet). At least we had a place to stay though!
Monday July 19, 2004 - "Take the Campsite and Run"
Today was a lot less action packed than yesterday, but it began with us packing up the campsite and quickly leaving without paying. That's waht you get (for overcharging for your 5 square foot campsite)! We high-tailed it to Pacific Rim National Park - the closest government campground to Tofino (about 15 km out of town) and got one of the few walk-in sites available. Unfortunately we had to park outside of the actual site in the main lot, making it a little inconvenient to cook since you had to keep all food-related items in your car whenever you left your site. On the upside it was only $14 per night. It was also the first time we'd set up camp in the morning, leaving us with a whole rainy day ahead of us for exploring. We stopped into the visitor info centre and got some hiking suggestions (including detailed instructions to finding the trail that Jesse had told us about during the drive out). So we headed to do the hike, which starts off to the side of the lookout at Radar Hill within the Pacific Rim Park limits. It was an unmaintained trail leading through the rainforest from the lookout to the ocean. We guessed that it was somewhere around 1.5 km long - a 45 minute walk through mud, streams, roots and moss. We did it barefoot upon the recommendation of the visitor centre, and it was unreal. The trees and roots are unbelieveably large and abundant, and it smelled and looked musty and mossy. The whole deal with Pacific Rim Park is that it is a preserved rainforest area, getting the most rain on the West coast. When we got to the beach, we were the only ones there, and it was also very mind blowing. We'd finally reached the REAL Pacific Ocean. The one with nothing separating us from Japan but a crapload of saltwater. We stayed there for probably an hour, climbing rocks and taking pictures and just chilling out before taking the same path back out and up to the parking lot (it was just as good the second time around). That evening was telephone time back at the campsite, followed by dinner at an oceanside restaurant for some fresh fish. It turns out every restaurant in TOfino is packed every night due to tourists. Luckily for our hunger, the first one we found was the least busy (based on our eavesdropping on other parties). I'm not convinced it was the best seafood restaurant in town, but it was still quite enjoyable. I couldn't resist the draw of the fish taco (salmon fajita actually), and Rocky enjoyed a peach-something-something salmon dish. Hometime brought a relative early bedtime since we werent allowed to have a fire at our site. We needed the sleep after all of the activity leading up to our arrival though.
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