Juan de Fuca Trail Trip Log
Friday
It’s currently too early in the morning. We’ve got ages to drive today, plus 12km of hiking, so we’re off by 06:00. Stéphanie, Brook, and Jay have come to pick me up, but that’s not all that’s being picked up. By the time I open the door, Jay and Brook, embodying the pinnacle of good preparation, have sprinted off to the convenient 24-hour grocery store down the road, picking up supplies for the trail. Jay and I are in the same food group, so hopefully there won’t be any more restocking needs, especially not three days into the trail.
An hour or so later, we’re in a parking lot stopping off at Coast Capital, and Jessica calls me to coordinate the two cars. There’s an incredible amount of static on the line, and incredible lack of Jessica. If the static on the TV in a snowstorm, then this is Winter Storm Jonas that took out New York for three days. We try texting instead. Jessica’s one text has been received five times. Is Comcast running this network?
The essence of Jessica’s text is that we should meet up with the other group at the China Beach trail head, leave the car that we’re in there, and continue on to Port Renfrew in one vehicle. I fail to understand exactly how the math on that would work (helpful hint: it won’t), and the other group seems to have reached the same conclusion when we reach them, and we continue on towards Port Renfrew. On the way, we overtake and get overtaken by the same sewage truck about 25 times.
Once we’re at the trailhead, Stéphanie has to return to China Beach to leave her car there, meaning Jay, Brook, and I have about an hour and a half to kill before we start going. Jay has a snack, we pay our camping fees (I get to be the listed adult! Hooray!), and we set off for Botany Bay, to take in the sights and waste a bit of time. There is some debate about what should be done with Stéphanie’s backpack- Jay and I are on all for leaving it at the sign and walking off, while Brook… has slightly more intelligence than that. They carry it 700m down to the beach, which was is very pretty, only for us to realise that we should really saddle up and get over to Botanical. Upon arrival, Jay realises it’s a great place for a snack.
Time goes by, and the rest of the group hasn’t turned up. Did Stéphanie cause a horrific collision drag racing the sewage truck? Did the group decide that the West Coast trail looked prettier? Did they stumble upon a five course sit down buffet? Brook and I hike back out to the trailhead without our bags, an idea of questionable integrity being Jay would have nothing to do and about 15kg of food with them.
We return to the trailhead to find a pickup truck with a sheet over the CapIt and bare limbs sticking out. It sounds like a thorough scrubbing of the truck bed is going on.
Reunited with the rest of the group, we begin our hike back to Jay. Without my backpack, the trail is super great! The story in about five minutes may be slightly different.
Seven minutes later, and we’ve gone from The Teddy Bear’s Picnic to Les Misérables. (I kid. Mostly.)
About an hour in, we’re walking across the most amazing salt flats when we spot a big old ball of fluff looking incredibly cute.
Oh hold up.
That “fluff” is very much moving, and very much towards us. No walls, barriers, or fences (mostly because a bear couldn’t pay for a fence!) between us and this bear, just flat salt marsh. It’s far enough away that we can give it loads of clearance, but it’s a little unnerving at the same time. Luckily we met it here, not in ten minutes when we’d be back on the trail.
About lunch time, we arrive at Payzant Creek Campsite, our designated lunch location. Eating happens down in a canyon with a creek running through it, and the temperature difference is akin to walking into one of the refrigerator rooms at Costco. Really quite nice.
Lunch is fairly normal, with lots of cream cheese going on, Willow eating steel reinforced tortillas, and Stéphanie trying to share all her group’s food. Brook shuts the sharing action down faster than HBO does on a pirated episode of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, and fair enough. You’re not going to find a convenient Real Canadian Superstore location out here. The best we’ve got is Sleep Country Canada, strapped to Jessica’s backpack. She insists it’s just a Therm-a-rest, much akin to Volkswagen insisting it was just an “oversight.”
It’s not like I’m one to speak — my backpack is so much MEC that you can now use the Ship to Store option on mec.ca and come pickup your order from it.
Not everyone is dressed completely in polycotton SPF 40+ DWR treated garments. Brook, for instance, is wearing a tee shirt they seem to have gotten at a rummage sale 15 years ago, and then proceeded to wear for the entirety of the Amazing Race Canada.
Onwards to Parkinson Creek. Things on the MEC front have gotten worse- we’ve gone from satellite pickup location to fully fledged regional headquarters.
Since we’re only 4km away from camp for the night, and it’s currently 14:00, we have a swim break in the creek below the bridge. I don’t actually go swimming, but instead clamber along the side of the river with my D5100, hoping very much indeed that I don’t lose my balance and turn a $500 camera into a skipping stone.
Once the swimming is over, Jay tries to pull a fast one and get me to bring all the snacks down the ravine to where they’re lazing in the sun. What do I look like, Amazon Prime Air?
Onwards we trek towards Little Kuitshe, stopping only for an incredibly cute frog by the side of the trail. The campground is fairly busy when we arrive, and we settle on perhaps the most terrible of spots. Jay and I (in our tent) got a super nice flat, sheltered location, and everyone else elected locations that were remarkable hilly, or in Brook’s case, literally just a cavity beneath some fallen debris. Being in a tent seemed to make everyone give Jay and I the nice spaces, but I certainly wouldn’t have — the nice tent can make up for poor ground. No complaints from either of us though.
The sleeping situation (for some, at least) seems to be the biggest potential vulnerability. Willow brought only a hammock for herself, completely reliant on there to be appropriately sized and spaced trees available. Today is okay, but I worry about other sites. Jessica has opted for the classic Muriel solution of just bringing a (Serta Perfect Sleeper® SmartSurface™ Elite) mattress and throwing it, along with herself, into a bush. I wonder how that’ll fare with the forecast 16mm of rain on the last night. Will, Brook, and Stéphanie have gone for the silicon tarp option, which apart from the lacking thermal qualities, seems to be the best thing going besides the tent.
We opt to cook supper down on the beach, both for Bear Aware and prettiness reasons. The only problem with this that we encounter is that our kitchen is right on top of US Interstate 5, with 201,000 vehicles going by per hour.
Not quite, but there is a good number of people trying to get by. It appears that out on the point a Yoga conference is going on, and the attendees need to go, realise they forgot their mat, go back, realise they forgot their Clif Bar, go back, realise they forgot their raw smoothie, and finally, upon going back once more, determine they’re too tired to do yoga and go back to camp. Things are not helped by the truly astounding amount of food, stoves, water, stoves, people, stoves, sporks, stoves, and musical instruments we have on the rocks.
As night falls, we pack up our dry sacks to put in the food cache and get ready for bed. Willow has been gone for a fairly long time, so Jessica and I wander off towards the beach to investigate. Turns out, Willow was just watching the sunset. Nat and I forget that this was a find and retrieve mission, and join Willow in sunset watching.
About half an hour passes, and lights appear down by the beach entrance. It’s a none-to-happy Brook and Stéphanie, who were worried about the three of us after we all disappeared for a good while. The level of unamusement is at an all-time high, if just slightly lower than that of Sleep Country when you try to Buy a Mattress Anywhere Else.
Saturday
About 05:00, I start to hear the distinct pitter-patter of rain in the forest. Whatever, all our kit is in the tent.
About 07:00, and it’s a rude awakening to the sharp realisation that while our kit very well may be in the tent, the fly is not on! Queue Jay tactically storming out of the tent and inflating what sounds like about 53 bin bags, but is actually them getting the fly onto the tent. After communicating with everyone via hand signals (no one can hear a thing with this fly shaking going on), we decide to just hit the road, so Jay leaves the fly half on the tent in the sloppiest way I’ve ever seen. Now the fly is getting wet along with the tent body, and at the same time almost completely obscuring my access to out my door.
Breakfast (oatmeal and Trader Joe’s Freeze Dried Strawberries) is had at the campsite, and then we do about half an hour of filtering water in the nearby creek. Some campsite users haven’t quite gotten the message on where/where not to do your dishes, because there is a good kilogramme of rice and an entire box of honey nut Cheerios at the bottom of this creek.
Leaving camp, it’s fairly easy going until we reach a suspension bridge, where we can take in breathtaking views of the Olympic Mountains and Strait of Juan de Fuca.
Or bounce up and down whilst running across.
You can guess which one most people opted for (if you’re wondering, Jay opted for Option E- None of the Above and instead had a snack).
Not far from there, we reach a beach segment. Due to rain conditions previously, we’re going to be taking the high tide overland route to avoid walking on more slick stones than we have to. It’s only 300m on the beach until that point.
Do opinions ever change fast. Once we saw the grade at which the overland trail was at (think along the lines of 110%), we decided that in fact, the beach was very safe. So safe. Safer than WorkSafeBC itself. If it wasn’t, well, we’d get to call 911 and catch a lift in yellow helicopter.
About 700m down the uber safe beach, we come across an obstruction that non-achieved the safety criteria we created from an inspired brainstorming session. We all knew the first step to safety in any environment, so some high visibility jackets were handed out. The next step was do then do the dangerous thing anyway, knowing that we’d be perfectly fine because we’re wearing high visibility jackets (proof). What we were dealing with was a sandstone formation with little traction in many areas, slick algae on the bottom 30cm, and the tide risen up to the bottom of the formation.
We got a couple metres along before figuring out that this isn’t a great idea, and sliding down into the ocean to walk along the sea floor. Willow lent me one of her walking poles, which was extremely generous. Without that, I very well may have slid and wound up soaked. Stéphanie did have a little slide, and wound up a bit wet.
Once we got back on dry land, I opened my bag to the smell of naphtha. Looks like someone (Jay, they were probably having a snack instead) failed to call FortisBC before they dug. Luckily, naphtha evaporates quickly, which means it didn’t spill over much of anything else.
We have lunch at the far end of Sombrio Beach, were we also get our proof of payment inspected by a conservation officer. He points out a neat waterfall just around the corner, which we visit and discover is absolutely stunning.
Up ahead, section “Difficult” begins. Not “Most Difficult,” that’s tomorrow, but still challenging. This is the most inland section of the trail, going over and around mountains until we reach Loss Creek, home of a vertigo-inducing suspension bridge. On the way to Loss Creek, we’re playing categories; a simple game where everyone starts at the beginning of the alphabet and races to the end, progressing when they can successfully answer the assigned category with the letter they’re on. About three minutes in, and I realise a critical mistake has been made. Occupation, Hobby, and Recreational Activity are all possible categories, and everyone’s trying to do produce item that begins with the letter they’re on Farmer to satisfy any of the three. On A? Apple Farmer. F? Flashlight Farmer. W? Weetabix Farmer.
That scheme is quickly shut down, much to everyone’s dismay. Time limits are also introduced, mostly whenever I get tired of it being your turn. Jay, the first person who got timed-out, has got a lot of complaints for me. They in turn are provided with the official complaints call centre number: 188DONTCARE (1–883-668-2273).
We reach Loss Creek, and Jay is not a fan. We’re pretty high up, probably somewhere in the neighbourhood of 50m up with 60m to cross. While the bridge is built to very rigorous international standards (for instance, it cannot be made of cardboard, cardboard derivatives, or sellotape), I’m sure it feels more like holding onto a piece of twine being airlifted across the gap on a Russian helicopter from the 40’s with a pilot who’s had a touch too much to drink and been watching a conspicuous amount of Top Gear recently.
As the group splits up due to terrain difficulties, Will does an amazing job trying to keep our game of Categories alive by running back the categories from me in the front to the back group. I’m blown away that he even has the slightest bit spare energy, but really shouldn’t be — his bag was almost entirely full of Clif Bars, and the room left over was then filled with Luna Bars- a wholly owned Clif Bar subsidiary.
Our arrival to Chin Beach was not nearly as dramatic as last time I was here. Last time, the tide cutoff was such that we could pass… but only when the wave was receding. It was then a mad dash 20m up the beach to dry land, where the campsite was. That was okay for most of the group; we timed it well and only one person went at a time. The exception was Silas. His bag was manufactured by Apple in partnership with U2, so it was constantly trying to shove it’s things where the didn’t belong. Not out to 700 million iOS devices, but to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. We had to get Anika, our resident RNLI Volunteer, to do a grid sweep of the surf looking for sleeping bags, food, and the occasional Black Diamond Ice Axe (“there might be a glacier, guys!”)
This time, we just hopped down onto the beach and wandered over to our campsite. We were greeted there by the familiar scent of campfire smoke, which was interesting to say the least. A full out fire-ban is currently in effect, due to extremely dry conditions. The people having fires seemed to be mostly practising good fire safety, except for ignoring the ban. If they weren’t, well:
Seriously though, if you see a wildfire, dial #5555 (in BC) or 911 right away.
The rest of the evening is spent lazing around the beach, watching the waves come and crash against the rock-on-a-post, hoping it too doesn’t get knocked over by vandals.
The main topic of conversation is a little house commune that Brook proposed we all create and live in. I’d be cool with that, assuming that we can get Telus to run fiber there for me (If anyone from an ISP is reading this, OC768 would be cool too…). Goats seem to be a popular theme with this small house commune, and those would also be neat as long as there were no goats eating SD cards, hard drives, or the like.
We drift off to sleep to the sound of the ocean, with another busy day to come.
Sunday
Day Three. More than halfway done distance wise, but today isn’t about distance.
Today is elevation. We’re going up 11 (13? 10? At any rate, many) hills, and then right back down them. 150m up, 150m down. And it’s not like we even got any good views at the top, as it’s completely forested.
The day is off to a good start at about 0 km/h (0 MPH) because Willow has decided to film an Ikea advert trying to see how much of her stuff she could flat pack and then get in her bag. The result is: Willow should not work for Ikea, as this campground is looking less and less like an Ikea Catalogue every second, and more and more like a single stream recycling facility.
As a fun bonus treat, all our food bags in the food cache are covered in a brown, sticky solution. Molasses, maybe? I’m genuinely not sure. I think someone else in the campsite failed all the etiquette courses and put their rubbish in a leaky bag on the top of the cache. Further, Jessica’s toiletries bag is missing from the cache. Nat is completely stumped, but my money is someone got over excited by the Return it, it’s worth it ads and returned the bag to Willow’s recycling facility for incineration. After all, every one of Jessica’s belongs you don’t recycle says something about you.
We start the actual hiking bit by cutting right to the chase. Straight on up.
This bit of the trail is very reminiscent of BC Ferries. You spend a lot more time than you expected going almost nowhere and using huge amounts of energy. When you’re sure there couldn’t possibly be yet another sailing delay, you’re greeted by the automated voice over the tannoy: “Attention all Saturna, Mayne, and Pender Islands bound passengers. Don’t even think about making it home tonight.”
Replace the marine fuel with Clif Bars and the sailing delays with hills, and you’ve perfectly replicated our situation.
Along the trail, we’re playing overtaking with two hikers. We walk faster than them, but we also stop a lot more, so there is a lot of passing/being passed. The last time we’re passed was as we descend into a riverbed that we think might lead onto a pretty beach.
Getting down was slick, to say the least. The entire area is covered in thick shrubbery, so the only place to walk it in the centre of the creek bed. There is a teeny problem with this- between the creek being downstream from DuPont Canada, manufacturers of Teflon, and DuPont failing to comply with discharge into waterways regulations, this place is more slippery than a Conservative Party annual conference. This creek leads us to where it falls onto the beach, a 2.5 metre drop onto the pebbles below. There is a rope, but the intelligent person who put it in tied it to both the top and bottom, so it cannot be moved horizontally along this cliff face. Where it is currently positioned is right in the middle of the flow, where the cliff is not at all straight but really quite concave. We have to jump down, but getting back up might be interesting.
A light mist begins to fall, and that’s the queue to saddle up. The next issue is, how are we going to get up this waterfall?
The answer, in Willow’s case, is very muddily. She’s been voluntold to get up first, because… actually, I’m not sure why. I think no one else really wanted to go first.
Once a couple people are pushed up, the bags are thrown up. For some reason, no one had the foresight to leave them on the trail, so we’ve got a collective hundreds of kilos of equipment chilling down here on the beach.
Our baggage handling is terrible. Compared to us, Air Canada moves their bags with white gloved valets on gold trays. We were just hurling these things up onto a rock that happened to have a creek running through it, soaking and smashing everything.
We successfully get everyone up this cliff, and then Brook realises that they’ve their Leatherman down on the beach. Back we go.
We’re all up again, and Jay is pulling the Conservative Party Line on Climate Change — they’re trying to drag us all down as they go tumbling down a ravine back towards the creek. With the sharp shriek emitted from the bushes, Brook and I drop our bags faster than an exploding Galaxy Note 7 and get over to an upside down Jay lying on the ground.
Now, I really don’t want anyone on this trip to be injured. It would be terrible. On the other hand, I really want to ride in a yellow helicopter. Maybe it’s yellow helicopter time?
Thankfully (for Jay), it’s not time to visit our friends from the Air Force. We’re all good to go after a couple minutes rest (and a snack!), with our next destination being Bear Beach, a 6(?) kilometre hike from here.
The rest of the trail until Bear is very nondescript, albeit extremely gruelling. It’s got more green than the Green Party platform printed on FSC Certified Recycled Paper, going higher than Centennial Square on the 20th of May, and then dropping down again like the pound after Theresa May says anything related to Article 50.
We reach a creek that has a big BC Parks information sign at it, typically signalling that we’re reaching our destination (“We are nearing Bear Beach, Juan de Fuca trail. It’s now time for all passengers to make their way to the vehicle deck in preparation for offloading”).
Upon further investigation, this sign is stationed in a completely arbitrary location: the campsite begins in a kilometre, and the trail keeps on going as normal from here. Why there is a sign is anyone’s guess, particularly coming from an agency that has no money whatsoever.
Around this point, we discuss Jessica’s upcoming trip to Southeast Asia, Thailand in particular. She’s off for five months, and while it sounds like loads of fun to me, it seems some people are worried about her wellbeing. To quote her, she might be, “murdered, kidnapped, assaulted, mugged, attacked by a shark, bitten by a rabid monkey, poisoned by street food, scammed out of all my money or exploded in a volcanic eruption.”
Another kilometre, and we’re welcomed with an identical sign and the beginning of the actual campsite area. As we begin to scour the beach for sites that look good for camping, the decision is made to drop our bags in the event there is nothing further. I’m all for this, welcoming the change from feeling like an A380 burning a rainforest-slaughtering 15141 litres of kerosene per hour to feeling like Solar Impulse, light and free.
We settle on a location that is large enough for everyone and has amenities for both the tarp and tent, but Willow’s hammock may be in a little trouble. Brook offers to save the site, but with an even more poisonous clause in their Terms and Conditions that those of any mobile carrier under the sun: They want their bag delivered from the other side of the beach.
No.
Not even the slightest chance that was going to happen. I instead volunteer for this strenuous position, getting Brook to deliver. Their parcel service wasn’t very good, I didn’t even get a tracking number. Stick with Canada Post, folks.
Once everyone along the beach arrives, the tarp starts to go up. I look on in horror as I realise that with their current design, they’ll be entirely exposed to all the wind coming in from the ocean. Burrr! I’ve got a massive thing of tea going at the minute for everyone, but that isn’t going to last into the night. Ah well, perhaps the tarp sleepers exhibit the queer features of not actually getting cold in temperatures less than 17° C.
At dinner time, Willow has decided that caloric value is more important than taste, and has consequently made rice noodles without straining them to recover calories from the starch drained off in the water. What has actually happened is that she’s wound up with the sort of sludge you’d expect to find at a sanitary sewer treatment plant, if Victoria had one of those.
It comes to Stéphanie’s attention at this point that the windshield for my Whisperlite is very much her windshield that I borrowed and never returned. She’s not incredibly pleased. At all, really. Unfortunately, her dad has already bought another one, so the old one coming home would be equally suspicious.
It’s fairly late, and Willow’s hammock is still not set up. She’s currently trying to hang it between a tree that might have the circumference of a small planet on one side, and a bush so amazing thin that an electron microscope has been left here so you can actually see it. I’m sure that this is going to end in a sharp vertical experience at about 02:00, and then probably some coarse language.
Good news (at least in the long run) is that Willow’s hammock is not being strung up, a point reinforced by the splintering sound the shrub made when I lightly looked at it.
Bad news is that Willow doesn’t have a Therm-a-rest. Brook offers her theirs, opting for the floor. Most of the time “opting for the floor” means dragging the futon up from the basement, but Brook literally took the floor, being just dirt and sleeping bag. I’m thoroughly impressed — my solution would have been to get Nat to share one of the beds in her Sleep Country Canada shop.
The discussion before bed was… well, interesting. I should probably leave it at that.
Monday
We’re getting ready to go, and things are slower than the infamous spinning dots of the continual “Configuring Update to Windows 10” screen that millions of Windows users see on what feels like a daily basis. I’m not sure who’s at fault here, but I think the recycling facility thing has been taken over by the council, so Willow is okay to just get on with packing, speeding her bit up significantly. Will, in an effort to match the macho-ness of Vladimir Putin, has tried to load up on all the heavy items from his group. What he doesn’t know is that while he was away filling water, covert operations were going on removing everything weighing more than 100 grammes and replacing them with empty bags, pillows, and probably some of the fake sheep from Jessica’s Sleep Country Canada store. As an added bonus, Jay also got a golf ball inserted into their backpack (and I’m not sure if they know or have found it yet!).
We lurch away from the campsite, with a good kilometre to go walking down the beach. Beaches are really not my favourite terrain, because all the little pebbles drastically increase the amount of effort each step takes. The view of the Olympic Mountains is stellar, so that makes up for the beach walking.
We get to the beginning of the land trail, and we’ve accidently got on British Airways to Rome and found the Spanish Steps. 135 marble steps rise into the wilderness above us, and while the land goes up, moral goes straight on down. Once at the top, it’s a fairly easy walk. We see lots of dog walkers and day trippers popping down for a picnic on the beach, and it’s not even 11 yet.
This bit of the trail actually leaves the provincial park, and we get out onto Crown land leased to a forestry company, putting a scenic trail within metres of chainsaws, construction equipment, and long distance lorries hualing felled trees. Even when we can’t see the cutblock, we certainly can hear the petrol engines and the tears of the trees. Really acing this wilderness thing, Ministry of the Environment.
We quickly approach Mystic Beach, as it’s really not far at all. Once on the beach, we discover that the entirety of MEC Victoria on a Saturday has decided to turn up. The parts per million of nitrogen in the air, usually making up about 78% of dry air composition, have been outnumbered by Gore-Tex at around 6:1. Luckily for us, all the day trippers have congregated at one end of the beach, and we quickly choose to stay at the quiet end of the beach.
We’ve got until about 16:00 until pickup from Stéphanie’s mum, and the time now is half twelve. We’re all used to waiting for this much time or more, as we’ve all traveled on BC Ferries before, but that doesn’t mean anyone is exceptionally pleased. The last of the food is broken out, which entertains everyone for about 30 minutes. Willow has some fluff that you can add water to and shake a bunch and somehow hummus is the end product, but I’m pretty sure the middle step is to compost this fluff stuff and just go to the grocery store and buy some decent hummus. This stuff is exceedingly good, and there is no way that fluff could be responsible for making it so scrumptious.
Oh, the secret’s out. It’s from Whole Foods and costs about $2.57/gramme.
The next initiative in the entertainment scheme is to play the card game “Cheat”. Rules are simple: You have to lay down cards in order, but everyone may not have the card they need to lay down. If you don’t, laydown something else and try not to get called on it.
After a little too much giggling whilst cheating, I’ve got about 75 cards in my hand (two deck game), but have an innovative new strategy. I’ve laid down somewhere in the neighbourhood of 60 cards, and no one has noticed because the wind picked up and blew a couple cards away, distracting everyone. I’m pretty pleased with myself.
After the card game wraps up, we’re off again. It’s 15:00, and we’ve got to get up more stairs, walk a click and a bit, and then we’re done. Pickup is in an hour, but we want to make sure we get there on time.
15:05: we’re at the top of the stairs that we budgeted 20 minutes for. Will went to the effort of counting each step so that we could have certificates for our hard work.
Exactly 150 steps.
From this point on, we can go really quick — the ground is flat and there is tonnes of boardwalk and the trail is very well maintained. What a disappointment it must be for hikers going the other way, having like half an hour of this and then getting hit by reality on the other side of Mystic Beach.
Once we reach the suspension bridge, less than 300 metres from the parking lot, enthusiasm for going home drops to an all-time low. We spend a good half hour on the bridge, doing a health and safety inspection on the durability and resistance to swaying of the bridge.
I’m not sure that the WorkSafeBC approved way of testing a structure is to go out and bounce on it with seven people, but everyone else seems to think this is a great idea.
We get off every time someone wants to cross, and one time in particular a little kid was walking across, getting told off by his dad every 3 seconds for bouncing.
Whoops.
Now around here, Stéphanie had just about had enough of the “I want to stay in the forest forever!” rhetoric. Sure, it may be nice. You know what else is nice? The candy in her car. She’s leading the charge towards the parking lot, with some people (Will and I) happy to do whatever, and some people trying to slow us down to a point that taking BC Transit would be faster.
For any readers from outside the Greater Victoria region, every single option is always faster than BC Transit. Between delays, high load, and breakdowns, if you were trying to get from Swartz Bay to Sooke, the fastest option would be take the ferry to Tsawwassen, take Translink to YVR, attempt to commandeer and aeroplane, get arrested by CATSA/ACSTA, spend 25 years in federal prison, be released, go back to Tsawwassen, commandeer the ferry, and sail it to Sooke.
Anyone who looks at Google Maps and says, “Oh, I’ll just take the 70 and then the 61!” is flat out wrong.
Once we reach kilometre 0, Stéphanie’s mum is there to welcome us and take the celebratory picture. In a style that I could only describe as Taryn-esque, Nat, Willow, Jay, and Brook really don’t want to go past the 0 marker.
Stéphanie does!
While those four are bemoaning civilization, it’s candy time for the rest of us! Stéphanie’s mum has laid on some drinks, fruits, cookies and little yogurt pots for us to snack on, which is extremely kind of her.
After a debate more fierce than those in the run up to the 8th of November, the four who at this point are very reminiscent of picketers have been persuaded to cross the line. We say goodbyes, get in separate cars, and head on off.
What an incredible adventure, and I’m extremely thankful I got to share it with such brilliant people.
The End!
Epilogue:
Once I get home, I discover some very disturbing news. JAY has STOLEN my Werther’s Originals! If anyone has any information relating to the location of the Werther’s or Jay, call CrimeStoppers free of charge at 1 (800) 222–8477.