Our next adventure in British Columbia was to head over to Vancouver Island for the May long weekend. Eric took Tuesday off as well, so our plan was to head over on Saturday morning and then stay for three nights. We were trying to decide if it would be worth it to bring our trailer across on the ferry, but in the end we opted to just stay in hotels for the few nights we would be there and save ourselves the ferry fees for our trailer. We probably should have just brought the trailer over and then we would have been able to stay at rv parks for cheaper than hotels and stay for a week or two and really explore the island. Anyway,we got up pretty early Saturday morning and started packing up our trailer to head over to the storage place we would be leaving it at. This is what we found when we came out of our trailer that morning…

So this is what Eric was doing Saturday morning…

So our morning started a little bit later than we had originally planned, but it wasn’t too bad since Eric is such an expert at changing trailer tires by now! I had done a lot of planning for this trip and I was a little nervous about it all working out. One of the things I was worried about was our rental car situation. We had decided to leave our truck behind in Vancouver, and I had a rental car lined up at Enterprise in Nanaimo. We thought since it cost around $60 each way to bring a vehicle over and we were planning to do a lot of driving on the island, we would save money in the long run by renting a car since our truck is a bit of a gas guzzler. Also when you are just walking on the ferry, you don’t really need a reservation but if you are bringing a car over on a long weekend we would have had to have a reservation to be able to get on. Well, long story short, I decided to give the rental car company a quick call to let them know that we wouldn’t be there at noon as I had indicated on the reservation form, but we would be later then planned since we had had some car trouble. And this is when I found out that the rental car company was actually closing at noon on a SATURDAY of the long weekend and would not be opening again until Tuesday morning…ummmm WHAT??! That was my response and I let the gentleman on the phone know that I was not happy with their business hours. I had a little bit of a freak out (maybe a lot bit) on the phone with the poor guy and I was asking him if he could stay later or come back when we got there so that I could pick up my rental car. Obviously he wasn’t able to do that but fortunately he was at least able to cancel our reservation so that we wouldn’t be charged for the car that we would not be using. I ended up trying to call another rental car place that was in Nanaimo, and asked if they had any cars available for that day but never heard back from them. Thankfully Eric was very coolheaded and suggested that we could see if there were any spots available on the ferry to bring our truck over with us. I called their automated reservation service and found out that there was room for vehicles, but not until 7pm. We ended up finding out that the other ferry departure point had an earlier spot available. So we drove down to the Tsawwassen ferry terminal and drove onto the 5:00 ferry. Needless to say, it was a relief to be on the ferry with our vehicle situation all figured out.

Saturday was supposed to be the day that we were spending some time exploring Victoria. We drove off the ferry at 7:00 and found a Boston Pizza for supper. By the time we were done there it was starting to get dark and after driving through Victoria we headed on over to our hotel. Day 2 of our trip was spent driving North to Nanaimo area. We stopped at Petroglyph national park, tried a couple different kinds of nanaimo bars in Nanaimo, spent some time at the beach, and went hiking at Neck Point Park.

For our third night on the island, we drove all the way across to Ucluelet. We spent part of the morning playing mini golf and getting soaking wet on bumper boats. I think it might have been the hightlight of the kids trip. It took close to three hours to drive across to Ucluelet, but it was so lovely and we even saw a couple of bears along the way. While we were in Ucluelet we went to the Pacific Rim National Park and went for a hike on one of the most beautiful trails I have ever seen. It was a rainforest walk, and it really felt like we were in the jungle. We could hear all sorts of birds calling and everything was so beautiful and green! We spent some time at Long Beach and felt the icy cold water. We also drove over to West Point trail and did some more hiking on the lighthouse loop. The kids were getting tired from all of our hiking adventures, so we headed to our hotel to check in and then find someplace to get some dinner. All said and done, we had a lovely weekend, but I really feel like we should have stayed for a few more days to really see the island and not feel so rushed. We left Tuesday morning and caught the 12:45 ferry heading back to Vancouver.