We’ve been planning a trip to Vancouver Island for about three years now. Last week we finally made it! It is a pretty easy trip from our place, it turns out…a skytrain ride to Georgia St and a 45 min bus from there to Horseshoe Bay where you catch a 1 1/2 hr ferry to Nanaimo. On the bus out of town a kindergarden field trip joined us, the twenty little kids were amusing until they got stuck in a jingle-bells rut at the top of their lungs for the last 15 mins of the ride.

The ferry ride to Nanaimo went by quickly as well, I was reading a fascinating book that I picked up in Portland called The Ion Effect. I was amused to discover it was written by a Canadian — Fred Soyka, he talks about ‘witches winds’ and how weather effects our health (a really interesting book). When we arrived it turned out Nanaimo was much bigger than I expected. I had to keep reminding myself that Vancouver Island is as big as England and probably bigger than New Zealand. I guess because Canada is so huge, Vancouver Island seems smaller than it is.