Back from the Island
A few days ago, Tina and I left Kamloops to visit my mom. It’ll be much harder to see her on Vancouver Island once school starts, so we decided to hit the road while we’re free to travel.
We left Kamloops with our first priority of arriving at a doctor appointment with our family doctor in Burnaby. In the rush to get there, everything was going great and then… parking lot. A garbage truck had caught fire in Langley and it took us over 2 hours to get past it. We missed the appointment by quite a bit, so it was straight to moms. Tina reminded me to call mom and let her know our ETA. As I picked up the phone to dial we looked at each other and said, “I thought you brought the phone number.” What a mess. We didn’t even have her address! From what mom told me about the area, and remembering the street name, I was sure we could find it. Thankfully, the street is only four blocks long and her description of the place was bang-on. Whew… disaster averted!
It was a nice visit and I’m impressed at what a good home they have! I went fishing with the guys on a beautiful day; it was a perfect day for the four of us to be on the water. We were only catching dogfishes from the bottom. After hours of coming up empty we headed back the boat landing. We stopped the boat only a short distance offshore on our way to the launch and I took the pause as a chance to toss my line in for the last time. In the 30m deep water I finally caught the first fish of the day–a ling cod. The funny thing was that the cod was also trying to swallow a smaller fish that came out of it’s mouth when we unhooked it. I used that smaller fish as bait and promptly caught another cod. Everyone was excited now. We all waited patiently for the fish to start rolling in, but it didn’t happen. I managed to catch my third cod before we called it quits (no one else had caught anything) and they all declared me the fisherman of the day.
After two nights at mom’s, we drove to Port Alberni to see a friend and his two sons. He drove us and the kids out for a short nature walk by a river only a short drive away, and outside the small city. The ’steps’ for the fish were pretty quiet (no fish yet. Too early in the season) but it was fun to be out. A last stop at Dairy Queen for some ice cream and off to bed. In the morning, we came close to missing our early ferry, but arrived while it was boarding–BC Ferries said it’s their busiest weekend of the year.
We spent some time at Mountain Equipment Co-op grabbing a few final items, a visit to our doctor to get a prescription for malaria pills, and then finally we were en route to Kamloops again. On a whim, we stopped to visit the Othello tunnels we’ve only seen signs for while driving past. It’s an impressive set of train tunnels built around 1916. The tracks were removed ages ago, but it’s a short walk. I couldn’t resist sticking my feet into the Coquihalla water, and it was wonderfully (surprisingly) warm, but we could only go to our knees since we hadn’t brought our swimsuits.
All said and done we put about 1200 kms on the car, and had a great time. Only four more sleeps until we board for Thailand!