Owen Smith

We've changed our plans a little bit.

During our long, cozy bus ride to Tofino, we had the opportunity to see the road which would lay ahead of us today. My general feeling transitioned somewhere along the lines of "these hills are going to suck, what a way to start" to "hmm, the shoulder disappeared for a bit, that's unfortunate", to "Oh god, we can't do this, we're going to die".

So, once we arrived in Tofino, we got a room in a motel across the street from the bus depot and I promptly starting looking for ways to get out of our mistake. Thankfully I found one. Instead of slowly spinning our way through such a treacherous passage we are staying in Tofino for the day, giving us time to check out some of the local attractions, and catching the M.V. Frances Barkley Friday afternoon out of Ucluelet back to Port Alberni. We'll still be cycling and leaving from Tofino, just taking a nautical break a little sooner than planned.

Traveling is hard when you actually have luggage. This hasn't been quite like the sorts of flying I'm used to in the past. After packing up my possessions to put in to storage, and finally packing up my panniers. We all got to bed at a very reasonable 23:30-midnight area; of course waking up just 4 hours later made me question it's reasonableness. We wanted to get to the airport early lest there be any difficulties with our bicycles (there wasn't) since Air Canada is sure to remind you there is no guarantee of space for them (there was).

The rest of the trip to Vancouver wasn't so bad though, given there isn't too much you can screw up when sitting on a five hour flight. We eventually decided to take Aerocar to an inexpensive hotel on East Hastings St nearby the bus station, and the driver was even nice enough to take us by MEC before we got there. With all of this travelling about, I had neglected to consume any food since the Bagel BELT from Tim Hortons on our way out of Waterloo; as such the remainder of the night had become a little spoiled. We did get some walking in though, and there is still plenty more we can see when we come back through the city on our bicycles.

Travel this morning has been a bit more difficult. We needed to get from the hotel to the bus station, to the bus, onto the ferry, off the ferry and onto another bus all while lugging around two bikes in boxes and 50lbs of packed panniers each. Wish they had baggage carts. We're on the bus to Tofino from Nanaimo though, so it would seem to have worked out.