This is my last post about our west coast trip, I promise.
While we were staying in Victoria, the Pie and I took two days out and drove up to Courtenay to visit Tim, one of the Pie’s childhood friends from Ottawa who had made the move west. Tim was best man at our wedding. There’s pretty much only one highway that goes the length of Vancouver Island, and if you go anywhere north of Victoria you are going “up island”. Courtenay-Comox, while situated pretty much in the middle of the length of the island, is considered to be the farthest you want to go up island. When I was a child, I actually thought it WAS at the northern tip of the island. It turns out instead that nobody really wants to go that much farther than Courtenay-Comox, and the best way to go further is to take a boat.
So we rented a car. My firm gets me a corporate discount at Enterprise rentals, and they’ve always treated me well. Since it was just the two of us and we were only traveling for two days we rented an economy-sized car. I joked as we were waiting in line that I’d love to take the little Smart Car in the parking lot on our trip, and the Pie rolled his eyes. Little did we know that it was the only “economy” sized car left in the lot! Have I mentioned that the Pie is 6’4″? This was going to be interesting.
Neither of us had ever driven a Smart Car before so we took it on as a challenge. Here is the super-awesomely small rear view mirror. There are no blind spots in this car, so it’s not a huge deal.
And the nonexistent leg room. And the lack of gadgets. And our pasty, pasty legs.
But the whole roof was glass, which was neat when you are driving through the mountains.
Though because the car is energy-efficient, it seemed to always want to be in the highest gear possible, which meant it rumbled along like it had a diesel engine. An engine that never wanted to accelerate, and that shifted violently, like a newbie on a standard transmission. And it was an automatic!
We booked it up to Courtenay, sliding through Chemainus and its famous murals and Nanaimo, where we got a coffee.
We hit Tim’s place in the mid-afternoon, and he took us out to Stotan Falls to cool off, as it was about 33°C and sunny.
This series of short falls is a very popular place to come and sit in the sun and the water. While much of it is very shallow, the limestone has worn away in spots to form these potholes, which can catch you unawares.
Some of them are large enough to tuck yourself into, as Tim demonstrates here.
And you can swim in the deeper, cool water just after the falls. Floater that I am, I nearly got swept away because I couldn’t get my feet under me, but Tim hauled me out safe.
In trekking around, we also got to see some neat fossils. That’s my foot, for scale.
As well as the sheer neatness of the geology of this area.
That night we drove to Comox and had dinner on the sandy beach near CFB Comox. While planes took off behind us, the sun set to our left.
The water was so warm that even the Pie went into the ocean and swam. This is a history-making moment, people.
On the way home we got a brief tour of the organic spa that Tim owns with his partner Lisa. If you’re ever in Courtenay and you need a massage, Ziva is the place to visit. After my ordeal in the rapids I could have used a massage myself, but it was late.
The next morning, after saying our goodbyes, the Pie and I began our trek south, though in a more leisurely manner. We stopped at a farmer’s market in Qualicum Beach, which happens every Saturday.
Our breakfast consisted of some locally roasted organic coffee, local tay berries, and home-made cinnamon sticky buns.
The tay berries taste like a combination between raspberries and blackberries, and look like logan berries (what’s the difference, anyway?).
The cinnamon buns were so sticky and delicious we may have died a little.
These were my sticky and stained hands at the beginning of breakfast. By the end I was a total mess. The camera was going to get sticky if we took a picture of that so we refrained.
Then back to our Smart Car, which we had dubbed Blinky.
To give you a sense of scale …
We paused at the Little Qualicum River Falls, which were stunning. I took way too many pictures, but you can see some below.
And had a brief stop in Cathedral Grove, home to some of the oldest and tallest trees on the island. We didn’t stick around too long, because the Falls hike and the Falls themselves had made us very thirsty.
Then we had lunch in Coombs, which has to be one of the weirdest towns I have ever seen. This exporter seemed to own the whole place, and had these strange (and not for sale) sculptures all over the open space. The wooden and marble sculptures inside were even more fantastical, and many of them were pornographic. We weren’t allowed to photograph any of them, though, and I’m not even going to get started on some of the strange chairs they had there.
In the same place was Goats on Roof, a market place specializing in imported foods. And all sorts of kitschy Asian paraphernalia, like these lanterns, which hung everywhere in the store.
Let’s not forget that there were actual goats on the roof.
It was a long drive both ways, but in the Smart Car we only went through one tank of gas, even with all our perambulations. It was a nice change of pace to be on our own schedule and under our own steam, and we quite enjoyed the trip. I was very sad when we had to return Blinky. Not a good car for highway driving, but a fun challenge nonetheless. And backing up was AWESOME. What a fun trip!
Ali Does It Herself 