Because travel is better with two - By writer/editor/photographer Melanie Wynne
Our 2008 trip to British Columbia was incredible:
Clean air, astonishing mountains, spectacular gardens,
shimmering bays and deep forests,
with nesting eagles and candied salmon to boot.
Here are some resources to help you plan your own “travels with two” to British Columbia.
Continued from Sidney by the Sea
On a chilly, gray late-May 2008 day on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, we set out to somehow reach the west side of the island.
It should be said that doing this is not necessarily easy, and few locals even know how.
Continued from Salt Spring Island
In late May 2008 on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, we took the Crofton ferry to Salt Spring Island, then the Swartz Bay ferry back across to Sidney by the Sea.
Sidney by the Sea is a pretty big town for Vancouver Island. There are new apartment complexes going up all over, and the central shopping district has several blocks of businesses rather than just one or two. Built around the sea, as advertised, the town actually sprawls far and wide along the highway, stretching from a small facsimile of a 1960′s Florida retirement village into a semi-rural community.
We’d come here to taste cider — the fermented kind, that is. [Read more...]
Continued from One Night in Calgary
Our first journey to Victoria, British Columbia, during the especially dreary December of 1997, was socked in by gray fog and freezing rain. Thankfully, much of town is festooned with Christmas lights that time of year…or we wouldn’t have been able to see anything at all.
We spent most of our time indoors, hiding in bookstore stacks, Miniature World, and what was then a Canadian novelty to us, Lush Cosmetics. (Bless those little bath bombs.)
We’d stayed in a sad little B & B on a nondescript residential street, run by a woman with a lazy eye and seven ponytails. She made us feel uneasy, and killed romance with her very step. We’d heard Victoria was charming, and felt that someday we’d like to give it another chance.
In May 2008, thank goodness we finally did.
Note: Our trip to Canada was taken in May 2008
Just past Peyto Lake in Banff National Park was the unmarked Upper Waterfowl, little more than a tree-lined turnout on the west side of the road.
A fifty-something Scotsman and a young woman were taking a lunch break at the turnout, their heavily-laden bicycles cast aside for the moment; they encouraged us to check out the lake at the bottom of the hill and said they’d join us presently to enjoy their pudding by the water. [Read more...]
