America Part 2 (still Canada though...)

Quick message before this post starts: I had this written out and ready to post before my operation on Friday, but just wanted to let you all know that it went well =) My gallbladder is now gone (yay!) and I’m now able to move around a little bit! I had a pretty traumatic time in that my veins are very deep set and they tried around 16 times to get the IV into my arms, hands and feet with no luck., hit and damaged a tendon in my wrist and ended up knocking me out with gas. But otherwise, all good, and I’ll hopefully be back soon!

So this was the photo I left you with at the end of my last America post (although technically we’re still in Canada here…), any guesses where we were going that day?! Whale watching of course!! We’d been before when we were in New England (wow, old post popping up again there!) but we met some friends while we were in Tofino and spent the day with them, so decided to go whale watching (unfortunately I’ve got a picture of all of them except for their son, sorry!).

The whale watching was, of course, amazing and freezing! We saw so much wildlife, although the whales themselves weren’t quite as impressive as the ones we’d seen on the first trip we did, but still amazing. There were also seals, huge sea lions and super cute sea otters, as well as bald eagles, all really amazing to see! The scenery was also really beautiful, particularly as the last whale watching trip we did took us miles and miles out to sea so we could no longer see land. Here we were in amongst small islands and rocks with wildlife and pine trees everywhere. Oh, and don’t worry, we weren’t as close to the wildlife as it looks – I took and used my zoom lens that day, so we were actually quite far away!

And the next set of photos are from the next day where we went to a visitor centre all about the wildlife and the native people of the area (I always find these super interesting!). This visitor centre was especially good because it had a spinning giant yellow banana slug in it! Now, you should know, my sister is terrified of slugs – to the point where we’ve had to physically carry her over the slugs when she was younger! So this was not her idea of fun, but we found it pretty funny, particularly riding the slug (not sure if we were supposed to be doing that though…) So we had a good couple of hours in there (there were some films to watch too), then went out for a walk along the beach of the West side of Vancouver Island. I wasn’t particularly looking forward to this, as most people will know I’m not the most outdoorsy person once the weather drops below mild, and this was definitely below mild! But I’d layered up like crazy (like most days round there!), and actually it was one of my favourite days of the holiday! My mum and I managed to find some rockpools with sea anemones in, then finally these fantastically coloured starfish! There was also a lot of climbing on the rocks taking place…

And moving on to the next day in Vancouver Island (I think I may have mixed up some things here though!), more walking in the woods, this time in the rainforest where we took pictures with my camera precariously balanced on rotting wood boardwalks throughout the rainforest! The first picture is a fairly sad memory for us – at the Tofino campground, there were free logs, as many as you wanted, whereas at other campgrounds they cost like $10 for a small bundle. So we loaded up here ready for the rest of the trip, literally filled the compartments under the camper with them, with about 4 trips each back and forth from the log store with our arms full. Unfortunately we forgot that a few days later we were to cross the Canada-America border where our logs would have to remain! We definitely got some funny looks as we unloaded about a ton of logs by hand!!

These pictures are also from our heading onto our next stop on Vancouver Island, all the way to Victoria. So we had a few breaks on the way, including the bottom pictures below at Cathedral Grove where we saw some super tall trees and took pictures on fallen trunks across a dried river (again, not sure we should have been doing this!). And the final picture was at this awesome place we stopped called Goats on the Roof! Well, that was the main attraction anyway, there were lots of other things too including a book shop where I randomly picked up a book to discover this title!