Amy & Michael in North America: Ukee, Tofino & Victoria

Our last week in Vancouver and Western Canada was spent with Cass and Pete who, along with Alyssa, came camping with us on "The Island" as the locals say. We packed up our Dodge Caravan, and headed for Ucluelet, a tiny town about 30 minutes south of Tofnio. It's not an easy place to get too, but it's well worth the trip. It was a 2hr ferry ride from Vancouver, then a 4hr drive. Once you get out of Nanaimo, the city in which you dock, it's a beautiful drive. There are huge lakes where you can camp, and do lots of water sports. The whole drive was hot, and sunny, until we entered out campground.

We had to wheelbarrow our stuff to the campsite! It's not as fun as you think.

Apparently, there is something called a 'Fog Zone', which is where Ucluelet and Tofino lie. Everyone was saying how beautiful Tofino is, but they forgot to mention that even in the middle of Summer, it's freezing! We didn't go anywhere without layers. Cass and Alyssa recognised the area in which we were camping as a 'Twilight look-alike' and it turns out, some of the movie was shot in and around the surrounding Tofino area.

We were only there for 3 nights, but it was beautiful. We saw 4 killer whales from our camp site, which was incredible. We went to the beach which you couldn't actually swim in as it was freezing (unless you were one of the crazy locals), made smores, and just hung out. It was the best way to spend out last remaining days in BC.

Enjoying our first beer!

View from our tent

Panoramic views

Enjoying drinks from our beach front Campsite

Alyssa taught us how to make Smores!

I'm now stepping a little back in time to April when we headed to Victoria, the Capital of British Columbia with Sam and Daniel. We went there for a night, which is actually quite a long way to travel for such a short time. It took about 4-5 hours to get there by public transport, which involved, a bus, a train, a boat and another bus. It was really fun though. It was a smaller town than I expected, but it had old, beautiful buildings. We went to a few breweries, but because of BC's crazy liquor laws, we weren't able to buy beers from the brewery, but we were able to have 'free samples' and fill our growlers. There wasn't that much to do there, just the main touristy things. We walked around downtown, looked at some old buildings but the highlight of the trip was probably going to the Butchart Gardens which isn't actually in Victoria.

The Butchart Gardens were beautiful. It's a year round garden that is open to visitors and has seasonal flowers. When we went, it was tulip season, and I have not ever seen such a wide variety of tulips. They have a Rose Garden, and Japanese Gardens too, which would be beautiful when in season.