Vancouver Island

We arrived in Victoria after 11pm, so we didn't want to look far for a place to sleep. A few blocks from the terminal, we found street parking that had no restrictions until 10am the next morning. Perfect. The next day we explored Victoria from our bikes - a very cool town - lots of interesting restaurants, street performers and artists, a fisherman's warf, etc. We spent the afternoon at Butchart gardens, an extensive series of amazingly manicured gardens Eileen had remembered seeing as a child. After a bit of driving we stopped in Duncan for dinner and parked for the night outside the local Ford dealer (we'd been having some trouble with the starter battery so I wanted to have them take a look at it in the morning). At about 3AM we were woken up by the police - they apologized for waking us, but suggested it wasn't a good place to stay since there was a known crack house a few doors away! They recommended the Walmart a few miles away. Wow, I guess that qualifies as our worst site selection ever! (The rest of the night was peaceful and Ford confirmed the battery was good).

We visited Qualicum Beach (Laundry, beach nap, cheese factory, etc) on our way to Lake Horne for the night. This is the site of a few public caves. We chose the self-guided adventure cave. With two flashlights each, we headed in. Turns out bringing a small backpack was a mistake: This was a very tight cave for most of it's length. We got very dirty, and it was challenging to figure out where to go next - lots of tiny passages to consider. By the end, we'd had enough of crouching over or sitting on wet rocks. Our next stop was Telegraph Cove, an old lumber community on a beautiful tiny inlet of water. We hoped to see Orcas from our Kayak here, but the wind really picked up and we had to head home before we got close to the Robson Bight orca preserve - where they apparently like to rub their bodies on the rocks!