August 9, 2009

Vancouver Island Adventure

My daughter’s boyfriend volunteered to take a truckload of things to a church camp on Thetis Island (his dad who was going to take them had a heart attack and had to be hospitalized). Since it was such a beautiful day we all decided to join him for the drive. There was my daughter-Jody, husband-Chester, granddaughter-Kiana, and daughter’s boyfriend-Jason and myself-Sharon. We left Maple Ridge at 6:45 AM in Jason’s beautiful, luxurious truck. We stopped for fuel for us (McDonald’s) and for the truck (gas).

We got to the ferry station at Horseshoe Bay just in time to catch the ferry for Nainimo. This is a very large ferry and takes about a 1½ hours per trip. Unfortunately it was not warm enough to stay outside but fairly quickly moved inside.


Sharon on the ferry from Naniamo

Ches

We drove directly to Chemainus to catch the ferry to Thetis Island, but had to wait for almost 2 hours. We walked around Chemainus and looked at the murals and houses and sat and watched the ocean for awhile. The time went quite fast.







A train that takes people around to see the sights in Chemainus



It is a nice 30 minute ferry ride to Thetis island. We drove over to the Church camp and delivered the supplies that we had brought. It is a very nice camp surrounded by the ocean.










We drove back to the ferry landing and had an hour wait. We walked around and looked at crabs on the beach. Kiana collected some seashells.


a Crab


Rock formation

Thetis ferry

As soon as we docked we drove to the next ferry landing to catch the ferry back to Vancouver. We got there at 3:30 PM and the line up was about 1 ½ miles from the terminal, fortunately it was a nice warm sunny day. Kiana, Jody and I walked to the ferry terminal to the washroom and bought some water. Then we walked back and the truck and they had moved up about ½ mile. We went to pub and bought some fish and chips and had a tailgate picnic at the truck. We were so happy when we got on the last ferry for the evening at 9:30 PM, after 6 hours of waiting. It was almost midnight by the time we got home, very tired. Ches and I had to get up early the next morning to drive 300 miles home to Vernon.