Ocean-to-Ocean, Part 9

Today I shall be boarding a ferry, but its departure time is 12h45 and the terminal is only 15 miles away, so no huge rush and there’s plenty of time for breakfast, which is apparently free courtesy of my Expedia status..

You’ll recall that I returned Rent-a-Car #1 yesterday, as they wouldn’t let me take that one any further than Vancouver. In fact, as I was driving through the city the previous morning it had bleeped at me with a “Service Due” message.

After checking out of the airport hotel and wheeling my bags back down into the underground car park it was time to locate Rent-a-Car #2. Given the choice of a Hyundai Tucson, a GMC Something or a Kia Something. I plumped for the former, vaguely recalling that I’d rented a similar model a couple of years previously and had found it to be perfectly acceptable.
This one was a newer version which had touch screens all over the place, where proper buttons would have been preferable, but such is the way with modern vehicles.

Once I had paired the Waze navigation app on my phone to one of the screens on the dashboard and figured out where they had hidden the little twiddly knob to put the gearbox into Drive it was straight out onto a couple of freeways towards Tsawwassen ferry terminal. Depending upon who you ask, that place is pronounced either “sa-wossen” or “saucer-n” – I opted for the former and nobody corrected me.
Rent-a-Car #2 was certainly more refined than #1 and initially felt much livelier, until it became apparent that it just had an overly-aggressive throttle response that was more like an on-off switch than a progressive pedal, which quickly got irritating in heavy traffic.

Running a little bit early (the ferry instructions threatened fire & brimstone upon anyone arriving more than one hour or less than 30 minutes before the scheduled departure time) I stopped at a nearby shopping centre to not-read some comments on GP, buy a bottle of milk and fiddle around with some of the car settings. Sure enough, buried deep in the Vehicle Setup menu, someone had selected “Sport” mode, the deactivation of which solved the problem of the jerky throttle.

The journey on the Coastal Inspiration was to be a quick two-hour crossing to Nanaimo on Vancouver Island so, unlike on my previous sea crossing, there was no need for a cabin, no Verandah Steakhouse and no games of deck quoits to play. Looking at Google Maps as the boat pulled away from the dock, I realised that we were only a couple of hundred yards north of the 49^th parallel and Point Roberts, the anomalous little American town isolated on the end of a Canadian peninsula with no direct land access to the rest of the USA. https://www.google.com/maps/place/Tsawwassen,+Delta,+BC,+Canada

Despite brief spells of inclement weather, the journey was very pleasant, most of it spent standing on the top deck watching other vessels sailing past and some of the little islands that came into view near our destination.

Vancouver Island is somewhere that I have wanted to visit for a long time. Other than a day-trip from Port Angeles in Washington to Victoria about 35 years ago, it will all be new to me.  Home for the next three nights will be Port Alberni, about 60 miles from Nanaimo. Once off the rather hectic freeway, we were deep into the temperate rainforest for which Vancouver Island is famous. Mentally noting several interesting-looking places signposted along the route, I resolved to visit these properly over the coming days.

Port Alberni was a nice enough little place, slightly touristy but not to the extent that I expect to see in the better-known coastal towns later in the week. Despite being well inland, the heavily indented coastline means that there is a saltwater marina and a commercial docks with direct access, via a long channel, to the Pacific Ocean. The first destination, after a rather uninspiring hotel breakfast, was Cathedral Grove Provincial Park. This is a forest of giant trees, some of which would have been saplings at around the time of the Magna Carta, draped in verdant green moss.

Moving on from there to Qualicum Falls for a wander around and a visit to a nearby Tim Hortons to make up for the poor breakfast, the next stop would be Stamp River, where there is a very elaborate fish ladder. This was constructed to assist huge (between 1 and 28kg) Chinook Salmon to return to their “home” river to spawn after spending several years at sea. They aren’t the easiest things to spot swimming upstream in the fast-moving water and foam, but I did catch a couple of them on video.

Stamp River. Spot the Chinook Salmon

So where to next week? The ultimate destination of this Coast-to-Coast trip, Tofino on the Pacific coast of the island, followed by the long journey back home but with some interesting places along the way.
 

© Snotsicle 2025