Rhosgobel: Radagast's home: June 13, 2004: Hourly Pictures

Friday, July 09, 2004

June 13, 2004: Hourly Pictures

Today we left our bed and breakfast in Victoria and drove to Nanaimo to meet some of my colleagues and take a boat to the island where we will be spending the next week.

The breakfast at the B&B was excellent, but quite different from the day before. Replacing the fresh croissants were fresh cranberry scones, and eggs were nowhere to be seen, instead some good thick French toast with fresh blueberries and well-fried thick bacon slices. We had maple syrup (of course), but also had Saskatoon berry syrup. Saskatoon's are supposed to be special Canadian berries, but we thought they were much like blueberries.

After breakfast we asked our hosts for B&B recommendations in Vancouver. After a few calls we found a B&B in Vancouver to stay in after the island trip, as well as another Victoria B&B to stay in the day we return from our island trip. We absolutely love the B&B we stayed in these past two days, but are curious what other B&B's are like so decided to switch. It was definitely awkward making reservations for another Victoria B&B, and we hope there were no hurt feelings that we didn't come back.

The drive to Nanaimo was supposed to take an hour and a half, and we had to be at the boat by 2pm, so we left at noon. By 2pm we'd just barely made it to the south end of Nanaimo, and only then did we realize we had to drive through town to get to the boat. We arrived half an hour late, rather stressed, only to discover my colleagues lazily having lunch at the dockside cafe. It turns out that some baggage had gotten lost, so we wouldn't be leaving for another hour.

We helped load the boat, and "another hour" quickly turned into 2.5 hours. When we finally left everyone fought to get a spot standing up in the middle of the boat, so since I figured I'd get seasick anyway I just settled in at the back. However, while powering through waves water kept flying over the bow, so everyone who had finagled a position standing up got soaked while kindly blocking the spray from me. That, combined with the fact that I didn't get seasick, made it a very fun boat ride.

Our hourly pictures from the day are below. Unfortunately my camera got put onto the boat before all the groceries, so from the time we loaded the boat (3pm) until after the boat was completely unloaded (6:30pm) my camera was buried under many pounds of grocery bags.