Swallowed by beauty......

The end of Victoria days…the wonder of Tofino, Northern Vancouver Island and more……

So as I prepared to wrap up Victoria I was having some seriously mixed thoughts. I mean, here is a cool little city, I have family there, it would be very easy to get into a subculture life there and I had support to stay. But this nagging got into me and like inception once an idea is started it’s tough to quash. So I packed up my gear, thanked LS for the use of her floor, shower, car and Victorian goodness. We spent the last Saturday visiting her favourite beach in Sooke, the weather turned nice on us and we decided lying on the rocks and reading for a few hours was the thing to do. It’s nice when you can do that with someone and it doesn’t feel awkward. “What do you want to do today” “nothing, just read” “cool”

The X-men castle...or so I'm told ;)

East Sooke Beach

Sunset at a chowder joint on the water...

Yum!

Victoria art at night

Ritzy politicians....we (the royal) should have stormed the building and taken their leader

So after saying that I would drop her keys off to procrastinating so long that she came home from work and I departed for Tofino in the light of the late afternoon.

Tofino…Tofino tofino tofino tofino….I could say it a hundred times! It was fabulous! As you know I’m doing this a little rogue and I have not paid for accommodation at all this entire 3…months I’ve been gone. So I boldly parked up in the public lot by the winnanininki (not the right spelling) Inn and took a stroll on the beach. How awesome is this!!

Right off the town front

Stylin

this town takes its exercise seriously

One of the many anchor tributes

Power

A regular sight right through till January

hippies

After walking from one end to the other I whipped up some din-dins and then decided it was “too dark” to depart for the night. I woke up to rain….and surf. So rainy that I wasn’t able to take any pictures, so rainy that even through my rain gear I was wet…and I had no idea how I was going to dry the gear out. My furnace decided not to fire up…that is a damp thing that I need to figure out asap as I get ready to drive back east. So cold, wet…and loving life I spent the day reading, walking, reading walking and then eating and sleeping. In the morning I caught the beach just before sunrise and wouldn’t you know it…the surfers beat me to it! These guys/gals are awesome! I think the instructor pictured here was going to get through her entire lesson without ever getting her hair wet!

The one place I allowed myself to eat out (it’s not a flamboyant vacation…it’s a lifestyle for now). Was…Tacofino. Saw it on the tube, it seems that whenever I get around cable all I want to watch is food shows and car shows. I can picture myself opening up a little café that makes extravagant food and goes bankrupt in a few years…properly structured a bankruptcy can be quite profitable J

So tacofino…the new trend of food trucks is old news to tacofino but I love it!! I opted for a “one of each” request but ended up wanting about 6 of them…and 6 more after that. This ain’t Juan’s taco…the fish taco is a crispy delight of fried fish wrapped up in a soft tort and topped with assorted goodies. I was originally going to double up on the tuna until the hottie working the truck said that they were “famous” for the fish. I honestly didn’t watch the food show itself…just that it was a taco truck in tofino and I was sold…turns out they really did deserve a show…delicious! Thumbs up, bellies (cow like) full and road destined…my 4 days in tofino were up and it was tie to keep moving…

Fish Taco!!!

So I keep driving…there is so much country to see here even just on this little slice of land that I could spend all winter just driving around here. But you can’t stop everywhere…and the next stop turned out to be Port Mcneil…a town that I turned out to love! Again I parked by the wharf deciding that bold is better than bashful. Took a great walk around the…town…it’s pretty damn small..and then bedded down. In the morning I spent more time in Mcneil, talked to some locals about what is good, what makes them Port Mcneil…no one had anything and the one guy said “A lot of people have gone on to great things who have left Mcneil”.

It’s a different town than the southern areas, it’s a logging town not a fishing town. The harbou, wharf was eerily empty for my vision of a port. It was picturesque though and I could see people wanting to raise their kids there. I headed up island after I got derailed by finding out the ferry to rupert only runs once a week on Saturday (and then I found out it also ran during the week..but time..). Originally I wanted to pull the scooter and head to Alert Bay to check out the native museum there…if you ever get a chance it’s supposed to be awesome.

I drove to Coal Harbour with it on the west side of the island, then to Port hardy to check out the ferry terminal and figure something out from there. I celebrated at this northern tip with some sushi by the water and a late night walk. The hotel I parked at seemed busy enough for me nooot tooo have to worry about anyone bothering me and it turned out it was right.

terminator rock area

When I woke up in the morning I had thoughts of driving out the Cape Scott…then I disregarded them due to time, then I took a shower (in a local parking lot) and re-thought it…hey I’m only here once right. So I threw a little more gas in the tank and headed for the Cape.

Well F-Me…that road was friggin insane. 2 things happened…the van got another workout that made the original offtrack workout of the 1200 look like childs play and two…I misread how much fuel I would need and I fell short of the goal…..

I was disappointed but the reality was that I had reached my turn around time, still had 20km to go (on a road that was 30kmph), was worried that I was going to run out of gas and decided to turn it around.