I’m writing this from a lovely hotel room on the marina at Port Hardy. We have a great view from our room that overlooks the bay and we can see small fishing boats moored up in the marina below. We just had dinner in a very friendly local pub, where the server knew almost everyone’s name and order. We weren’t really supposed to be here though. We should have been on a ferry that left Port Hardy this afternoon, except that because of bad weather earlier in the week our ferry got stuck up north and our sailing has been delayed until tomorrow morning. So, ‘yeay’ to unexpected nice hotel rooms. They’re not going to happen often on this trip! And here’s hoping the bad weather up north has passed and it will be smooth sailing for us tomorrow.
We spent the last two days driving up Vancouver Island. It wasn’t a huge distance, but we wanted to take our time and enjoy some of the sights along the way. So far it’s been amazing. We left Nanaimo fairly quickly – we’ve spent time there before. We had a quick stop at Rathtravor beach, because I couldn’t pass it without another look, and headed north to as yet unexplored territory, and hopefully away from the rain.
Campbell River had an amazing museum with interesting displays about the local First Nations community, including some really beautiful carved masks currently on loan. There were also exhibitions about the history of local industries, logging, fishing and canning salmon, and replicas of floating houses that families lived in, moving up and down the coast in depending on where they were working.
As we drove further north the towns thinned out and the traffic disappeared almost completely. We gradually turned inland away from the coast and were treated to some beautiful views of lakes and mountains; all looking rather sinister as the low lying cloud struggled to dissipate.
On Saturday afternoon we stopped in the small settlement of Telegraph Cove. Just south of Port Hardy this place is a tourist hub in the summer so it was interesting to see it in the off season when we had the whole place to ourselves. Most of the buildings here are built on stilts and sit above the water. The houses are painted dark green and red, and these shades complimented the autumnal trees and skies that sat above them and the steel grey of the water below, so I couldn’t help but take lots of photographs.
Now I’m off for a sleep, our ferry tomorrow leaves at 6am.
For more pictures of the journey so far, check out my flickr set.
