We hired a car today from a small car hire place down the road from the hotel. There is no digital or photographic record of this car as I have destroyed them all. The reason? The car was a white Fiat 500 with red and green go-faster stripes on it. Possibly the most mis-named stripes as all the Kings Horses and all the Kings Men would not make it go faster! So, the...
So – just to complicate things, we are now in Hawaii, but not on Hawaii. We are actually on the island of Oahu, but this is in the US state of Hawaii. The island of Hawaii is actually the easternmost of the chain of islands which make up the state of Hawaii and it is the largest island. For this reason, it is helpfully known as ‘Big Island’. On Oahu...
The second of two travelling days today. Our flight to Honolulu was not until 5.10pm, so we spent the morning wandering around Kerrisdale, the local suburb closest to our B&B. A nice area, though some of the houses did look like they might go for a small fortune! We had booked a taxi for 2.15pm and it was very prompt, getting us to the airport far too early. The...
Today was the first of two travelling days. We set off around 9.45am from Ladysmith and Tony and Gwen kindly dropped us at the ferry terminal in Nanaimo. There was an extra ferry on this morning, so while we were aiming for the 11am ferry, we actually just managed to get on the 10.30am one with a couple of minutes to spare. The ferry ride wasn’t particularly...
Today we opted for a quieter day – a tour around the places closer to Ladysmith. We started by heading down to the Kinsol Trestle – just inland from Duncan. This is a wooden trestle bridge north of Shawnigan Lake. The bridge is part of the Canadian Northern Pacific Railway. The line was started in 1911 and the bridge was built by local farmers and loggers...
We stayed overnight at Port Renfrew – a lovely spot overlooking the bay. from there we set off west a short distance to a spot called Botanical beach Provincial Park. We had timed getting there for low water as it is an ideal place to explore the tide pools and beach. The wildlife is prolific with sea anenomes, red, purple and orange starfish and sea urchins...
Given a good forecast for a couple of days, Tony and Gwen offered to take us off on a tour of Vancouver Island. Well actually the tour was planned to be just a small part of the south of the island. The island is huge – at 290 miles in length and nearly 100 miles wide at its widest point, it is the largest island in North America (and 43rd largest in the world)...
A day of travelling today. We set off about 9.30am to head to North Vancouver and drop the car off. This should have been an easy run – under two hours, but these things rarely go to plan! We managed about 15-20km from Hope on the Trans-Canada Highway and then came to a grinding halt … Eventually after moving very very slowly for about an hour, we were...
Mainly a driving day today. We set off around 9am and headed back on the Crows Nest Highway. After a stop at Deadwood Junction (a very nice cafe) in Greenwood for a coffee and butter tart (!) we carried on via Keremeos to Princeton for lunch. After lunch we headed to the B&B we booked in Hope arriving about 4pm. The host was really welcoming and gave us the full...
Today, as if we needed it, we got more evidence of how big Canada is. We are in British Columbia and BC is 7.2 times the size of England. If you take all of Canada, then it is well over 40 times the size of the UK! Today’s lesson in how big it is was a car tour around the West Kootenay area of BC. Sue took us on a drive around via Trail, Castlegar, Silverton...