Long Beach

If you visit long beach on Canada Day, the parking is free. So we made the trip to the island to take advantage of the savings! Well, maybe we had other reasons as well. (Note the sentence that starts and ends with the word "well") . We were able to camp on the beach and it didn't rain at all! In fact it was about as good as it gets in terms of weather on the west coast.

Had a bear come through our camp. Of the 8 people in our group, Reg and I were the last ones to leave camp that morning. I was eating breakfast and was walking toward the food to get myself another strudel, when I looked up and saw the bear about 10-15 feet away! What do you do when you come face-to-face with a bear? I found out. I said "WOAH!!! Reg, there's a bear in our camp!"

What are you supposed to do next? I don't know, I never read that chapter. Apparently town-bears aren't phased by yelling and flailing arms. But clapping and thowing sticks seems to work...sort of. Two minutes later he came back through a different part of the bush. And THIS time I got my camera out.

We scared it off yet again with more sticks and clapping and that worked for a longer period of time. The thing about where we were camping is that we left our tents up. And even after we told the rest of the group about the bear, nobody was interested in checking on/taking down the tents. When we got back LATE that evening, the bear had taken down 2 of the 4 tents, looking for non-existant food. Fortunatelly, our tent was OK. But the others had to use a lot of duck tape to patch holes and mend broken tent poles. I can't believe we still slept there that night.

Long Beach was gorgeous, and the water was very cold. Peter brought a kite to fly, which was an excellent idea (I would have been SO bored otherwise). There was enough wind that we were able to attach bull kelp to the bottom of the kite. We made a tail about 20-25 feet long. This was a 2-string kite that you could control really well. We would whip that tail around and try to make it snap, or slap the ground with it. Good fun.

Peter & Bronwyn's dog Coda had to be kept on a leash, as per the sign and the park warden. But she never said the leash had to be attached to anything. So Coda ran free, dragging a leash behind her. Whatever.

The last night we stayed at Sproat lake. A nice place except for the 20 bucks a night. The water was relatively comfortable and the grounds were beautiful. A good place to go, the next time you want to camp around Port Alberni.