To Nanaimo and back again
Oct. 24th, 2010 10:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fenchurchSo, I realized that I've completely fallen down on my goal of posting regularly, plus I'm several weeks behind on posting photos (although, really, there aren't all that many interesting ones, so I may do one picspam post that covers the last few weeks). The problem isn't even that I don't have anything to share... I have PLENTY to talk about, it just all pertains to the Big New Project I started recently (which isn't taking up a whole lot of time yet, but has pretty much taken over my brainspace for the time being). And Big New Project is still pretty tentative, so I don't want to jinx it with giddy posts about my progress. With any luck, I'll be able to talk about it in a few more weeks. *fingers crossed*
On Friday afternoon,rackham cut out of a work a bit early and we headed for the border... with reservations on the 5:45 ferry out of Tsawwassen headed to Duke Point outside Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. Yeah, that didn't work out so well... there was a really nasty accident in Ferndale and they'd closed all northbound lanes of I-5. Even with that, we only missed our ferry by a few minutes and ended up getting on the 6:00 ferry to Schwartz Bay outside of Victoria... followed by the 90 minute drive up to Nanaimo.
I've had a lot of people ask why we like to stay in Nanaimo... and I actually have a hard time coming up with a good answer other than, well, we like it there. It's pretty, it's the birthplace of Nanaimo Bars and we've found a really cool hotel that we enjoying staying at (the Buccaneer Inn -- we usually end up getting the Fireplace Suite, which is essentially a one bedroom apartment with a fireplace in the living room, for not much more than we'd pay for a really nice hotel room in the US). The people who run it are avid travelers and have done a great job of providing everything they like in a hotel when they're the ones traveling.
I was amazed by how much the town has grown since we were last there... it's really starting to sprawl northward! In fact, if it weren't for Butchart Gardens, the museum and the tea rooms, I'm not sure there would be any reason to go to Victoria now!
This trip was pretty much based around Geocaching and we had a blast... on our way into Nanaimo on Friday night, we ended up standing in line at a grocery store behind a fellow Geocacher, who gave us all sorts of suggestions for caches to try. As a result, we found a number of fun caches! Best of all, the rain held off on Saturday until near sundown, so we were able to get quite a lot done (and I slept well last night, listening to the wind pelting the rain against our windows... gotta love a good coastal storm!)
The other reason for the run to Canada was to stock up on Canadian Halloween candy. It's a great time to get all sorts of "fun-sized" versions of Canadian chocolate bars, which we stick a big old tupperware container and snack on throughout the year (and I do mean year... we just finished off the batch we got last Halloween). We probably should have gone ahead and picked up Christmas crackers while we were there, but decided we'd look at making another border run (this time just up to Langley, BC) sometime in November for that... when there's a bit more variety available.
Anyway, good to be home and hopefully I'll have some sort of photo update soon... especially if the shots I got of some of the channel islands turned out well.
Crossposted from my Livejournal
On Friday afternoon,
rackham cut out of a work a bit early and we headed for the border... with reservations on the 5:45 ferry out of Tsawwassen headed to Duke Point outside Nanaimo on Vancouver Island. Yeah, that didn't work out so well... there was a really nasty accident in Ferndale and they'd closed all northbound lanes of I-5. Even with that, we only missed our ferry by a few minutes and ended up getting on the 6:00 ferry to Schwartz Bay outside of Victoria... followed by the 90 minute drive up to Nanaimo.I've had a lot of people ask why we like to stay in Nanaimo... and I actually have a hard time coming up with a good answer other than, well, we like it there. It's pretty, it's the birthplace of Nanaimo Bars and we've found a really cool hotel that we enjoying staying at (the Buccaneer Inn -- we usually end up getting the Fireplace Suite, which is essentially a one bedroom apartment with a fireplace in the living room, for not much more than we'd pay for a really nice hotel room in the US). The people who run it are avid travelers and have done a great job of providing everything they like in a hotel when they're the ones traveling.
I was amazed by how much the town has grown since we were last there... it's really starting to sprawl northward! In fact, if it weren't for Butchart Gardens, the museum and the tea rooms, I'm not sure there would be any reason to go to Victoria now!
This trip was pretty much based around Geocaching and we had a blast... on our way into Nanaimo on Friday night, we ended up standing in line at a grocery store behind a fellow Geocacher, who gave us all sorts of suggestions for caches to try. As a result, we found a number of fun caches! Best of all, the rain held off on Saturday until near sundown, so we were able to get quite a lot done (and I slept well last night, listening to the wind pelting the rain against our windows... gotta love a good coastal storm!)
The other reason for the run to Canada was to stock up on Canadian Halloween candy. It's a great time to get all sorts of "fun-sized" versions of Canadian chocolate bars, which we stick a big old tupperware container and snack on throughout the year (and I do mean year... we just finished off the batch we got last Halloween). We probably should have gone ahead and picked up Christmas crackers while we were there, but decided we'd look at making another border run (this time just up to Langley, BC) sometime in November for that... when there's a bit more variety available.
Anyway, good to be home and hopefully I'll have some sort of photo update soon... especially if the shots I got of some of the channel islands turned out well.
Crossposted from my Livejournal
