Day 8 (7/18) – Breakfast provided by the hotel today! It just so happened that the previous weekend they held a sand sculpture competition in town and, though the competition was complete, the sculptures were available for public viewing and voting. None of us had ever seen professional sand sculptures in person. They were pretty neat. The amount of detail is pretty incredible.
Heather and Corinne both voted for the girl with the dragon. Jess voted for the owl. I voted for the big, furry guy offering free hugs.
Our next stop was the North Island Wildlife Recovery Centre. Which is a larger facility than it seems. You turn a corner and realize it just keeps going, again. Lots of injured birds. Jess enjoyed watching one of the ravens messing with the objects in its enclosure. A different raven, this one leucistic, named Opal, was working on digging a hole under the wall of its enclosure. And we saw a real life axolotl. So the girls were agog.
By the time we finished up with the animals it was past lunch time, but our next stop was the old country market known for the goats on its roof. Which…I give them credit. There’s no reason for anyone to be out at this place. Certainly if they just had a little shop selling sundries they’d be struggling. But, put up a sod roof and throw some goats up there and now you’ve got endless customers. They also have a cafe inside which is where we ate lunch. We saw one of the goats when we first arrived and it’s a good thing I snapped a picture, because we couldn’t see them anymore by the time we left.
The trip plans had an option at this point to head deeper into the island to Horne Lake Caves, but timing dictated we skip it in favor of catching the ferry and getting to our hotel before dark. Driving in cities is stressful enough, driving in a foreign city after dark sounds even less fun.
So we headed back to Nanaimo and lined up for the ferry. This ferry was substantially larger than the one we took to Victoria. I think it had 4 decks for vehicles. This was a 2-hour ferry ride and then we needed to drive into Vancouver proper–which we managed to do during peek rush hour. That was not so much fun, but we did it. We parked the van at the Blue Horizon Hotel and didn’t get back in for 3 days.
After getting the van unloaded through the maze of passageways at the hotel we headed out on foot to look around and find something for dinner. I had read that for the World Cup (and then extended through the end of summer) the city had closed a nearby street to vehicle traffic and created an extended pedestrian mall space. We walked down there, but discovered it seemed to mostly be bars. Wandering around some more we eventually ended up at an Italian restaurant, Pacifico pizzeria & ristorante. It was pretty good. I don’t recall why I’m making the face that I am in the picture. The girls had cookies from the restaurant for dessert. Jess and I got a slice of red-velvet cake and an eclair from a bakery across the street from the hotel. The hotel key cards were wood, which was a fun extravagance.
