Month: October 2024

It’s crazy to think that we will be leaving Vancouver Island on Tuesday to begin an 8-day drive across the US before driving back into Canada in Ontario, a little Canadian province swap with a US filler.

In the meanwhile, we are taking in the last days with the wiley Ws. Wall-E and Willow are sweet cats, who love their food, their naps, and chilling with us in the evening. We will definitely miss Willow’s curiousness and Wall-E’s thoroughness in ensuring all food bowls have been emptied.

Yesterday, we spent a couple of hours poking in and out of the downtown shops, walking down towards the water, and picking up toppings for a red fife (new grain for us) pizza dough that we had bought at the great bakery in Cowichan Bay.

Today, we drove out to Stocking Creek Park to do a couple hour hike on the very impressive 101 kilometer Cowichichan Valley Trail. We walked from the park in Saltair back towards Chemainus.

The following are some pics of the great walk on a beautiful fall day (low 60s F).

Bob and I left the house last night for a planned dinner and theater show at the Chemainus Theatre. We loved our experience last year, so had bought tickets for this year’s show and chose to do dinner at the theatre as well. It was a great evening, enhanced by our ability to be clean when we went, which is a whole other (now funny) story involving a lack of hot water, two American wussies who don’t enjoy cold showers, and a local plumbing company who insisted a new water tank was needed to resolve the issue before finally sending a technician who fixed the issue by pushing a reset button on the water heater (which we now realize is behind insulation in the panel on the tank).

Today, we ventured out to a local park to see a waterfall, check out a small bay community south of Chemainus and some seals, and stop at a couple of farmer’s markets.

Our first stop was Stocking Creek Community Park, which is located in the community of Saltair and has a network of nature trails through a rainforest and provide viewing access to a small waterfall. The park also runs alongside the Cowichan Valley Trail, which I run on in Chemainus.

We then drove about 35 minutes south to Cowichan Bay to check out the waterfront there. This is a fishing community, but we had also read about Steller Sea Lions from California that hang out on the docks in the fall on their migratory journey.

We stopped at two farmer’s markets. The first between Cowichan Bay and Duncan, which was hopping and where we found food for dinner tonight, and a second one close to Chemainus which paled in comparison.