An Erupting Volcano, The Bachelorette and a Million Dollars

The above is my phony headline meant to liven this post up. Let's face it- even I'm bored with these recaps. But I'm obliged to write them. When we're cast out of Canada and sitting on the porch in a lonely Texas town, we're gonna look at each other and say, "What did we do these past 2-3 years?"

I'm glad you asked, Caryl and Greg of the Future! Here's what you did on the second day of your trip to Victoria:

A rain forest was only minutes away from our hotel, so we stopped there on our way up the eastern coast of Vancouver Island. I read that some of the fir trees in this park are over 600 years old! We did pass some gigantic specimens along the trail to this waterfall:



Cool. Look at Tiny Greg at the bottom of the photo. haha!

We left the rain forest and headed up to the town of Nanaimo. We were told by a friend that we should check out a floating pub, off of Protection Island. We found the ferry that would take us from Nanaimo to this bobbing bar and bistro.

Dinghy Dock Pub

(Yeah- the palm tree is a curious sight in Canada. First one I've seen.)

It was nice to eat out on the water and watch boats go by. After lunch, we walked around the island a tiny bit. People live out there even though the only way to get here is by boat. There were a couple of women on our ferry, in fact, who had bags of groceries with them.



Weird purple starfish!

We liked this area. It was very pretty but not as crowded as Victoria. When we returned to the mainland, we walked around the town of Nanaimo and decided it would be a nice place to spend a night. Sometime. Not this day, though. We had more to see.

Onward. There was a beach we wanted to check out, further up the coast. I was disappointed we wouldn't get to see the ocean on this trip (it was a five hour drive) but we'll be back.

The neat thing about this beach is that when the tide goes out, it ain't fooling around. It goes OUT. We had to walk for days to get to the water.



And even after we got there, the water was so shallow, you had to keep walking forever to immerse yourself in it. We didn't do that. We stayed in water up to our ankles, marveling at how warm it was.



Even MORE interesting- we watched the tide come in. It looked at first like a wave coming in, but it didn't go back out. Greg had to keep an eye on his shoes because the water was spreading back out over the sand so fast.



It was a long day but lots of fun.

NEXT TIME: A UNICORN, JENNIFER LOPEZ AND A TORNADO! ;)