Well it’s been about a week and a half since I dropped Sue off at the airport in Salt Lake City. Unfortunately, there is much to keep her busy down in Florida and it doesn’t look like she’ll be able to rejoin me on the road. The upshot is that I’m gaining a fuller appreciation for the things she takes care of while we’re traveling, which include route planning and navigation as well as all or most of the food planning and preparation, among many other things. The astute reader may well ask, “Wait, then what’s left for you to do?”, to which I simply walk away in a huff.
We’ve talked about how a life on the road includes all the things that life usually does anywhere else. Well, another one of those things came up. We were over the Sierras and most of the way through Nevada when we got word that Sue’s parents were having some issues with her father’s care in Florida. Clearly the best way to help out was to be there.
We last met up with Pete and Sue on the road two years ago in Salem, OR. They’re also RVers, so we’ve got a lot in common beyond Pete and I being related in some distant fashion (it’s not actually that obscure – his father and my mom’s father were 1st cousins). Also of interest is that Pete is the older brother of David, Pinky, and Katy.
We mentioned in the previous post that we had rearranged our itinerary to include a stop near San Francisco, which we’d talk about later. That will be this post. There is also a post titled ‘Skyline‘ that I wrote during our trip two years ago that provides background that is relevant to this one.
In the Skyline post, I talked about my Aunt Ami and my Uncle Dick. A few weeks ago, as we were driving off the ferry to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island, the phone rang. Ami was calling to tell us that Dick had passed away.
Alaskans and Canadians have it all over the lower 48 with highway names…
As we adjusted our route back to Vermont from BC to include a stop near San Francisco (more on that in an upcoming post), we had an opportunity for a few visits along the beautiful (but unimaginatively named) I-5 corridor.
Vancouver Island is about 1.5 times the size of Vermont in both area and population, with a comparable amount of geographic diversity. Remembering that we’ve chuckled about travelers planning to visit Vermont in 2 days (‘It’s so small!’), we allotted 10 days to explore Vancouver Island and found it wasn’t quite enough – there’s so much there!
The coasts, the ferries, the forests, the farms, orchards and vineyards… The small towns, the city of Victoria… The hiking, kayaking, biking, surfing… (Surfing?) The rainforest with giant cedars, Douglas firs, ferns and moss, the palm trees… (Palm trees?) Here’s more on the lower part of the island…
With a week or two left for exploring before we need to start heading toward Vermont, we decided to spend some of it on Vancouver Island. We got passage on the MV Coastal Renaissance, one of the largest double-ended ferries in the world and radically different from the 6- to 10-vehicle river ferries we boarded while in the Yukon and Northwest Territories. The height of our camper required that we board the truck deck – 6 lanes wide and seemingly a mile long, filled with trucks and other RVs. On an absolutely gorgeous day, we spent the 2-hour trip on the immense upper deck, trekking back and forth and all around as we took in the sights. From the departure dock at Horseshoe Bay, we could look back on the Sea to Sky Highway hanging off the mountain, splotchy with low clouds. Islands in all directions looked like mountains popping out of the ocean, many dotted with small communities along the shores. We looked back on the city of Vancouver, beautifully situated on the ocean, as more mountains came into sight on the horizon – Vancouver Island.
We debarked in Nanaimo, a pretty city on the east shore of the island. Without a plan, we headed north toward the most remote part of the island. Little did we know, the moon was soon to enter the seventh house, and Jupiter would align with Mars, and we were about to get a unique Vancouver Island experience…
