Hey all, Hope everything is going great at home, we are still loving our little camping life. Sorry the updates are not as frequent, we haven't had any wifi for a while... Wednesday 24.04.13: Happy Birthday Sam :) xx First up this morning we went for a walk along the campgrounds and up to the viewpoint trail around Porteau Cove - we've got to keep exercising and stop eating like we're on holidays or we're going to pork right up hehe. The sun is out and and it's nice and warm when the wind drops off - it's meant to get to 18 today (woohoo) - practically hot by Canadian standards!!!! We're so excited!!! My mum & dad are coming over to the States in June/July so we spent the day planning a bit of a trip to catch up with them. Exciting times! Afterwards we had a Skype chat with Benny's parents and tried to Skype my family but the service was a bit patchy & kept dropping out. Since we're in the middle of nowhere and running Skype through our phones' data I was surprised that it even worked. Still it was nice to have a quick chat and also see Michelle's growing baby belly - so exciting! :) We'll have to try again soon when we're staying somewhere with wifi :) Thursday 25.04.13: Anzac Day today and a big happy birthday to Luke :) xx We went for another walk first thing this morning & it's shaping up to be another beautiful day :) There was a squirrel playing around in our campsite when we got back - I think people must feed them because he was so tame, he came right up to Ben's hand looking for food... We had a pretty cruisy day, it's so easy to lose the day just watching the wildlife and scenery from our camp. Highlight of the day was giving Benny a haircut - first one of the trip! We also received a text from Su saying all of our mail has turned up and she will forward it on to us so that's fantastic news. We'd planned to pick it up from her on our way through Vancouver again, but we'll go and get a PO Box tomorrow. We need a postal address anyway, we've just been slack in getting one! Friday 26.04.13: We received some happy news today that Mia Rose Stanaway arrived early but healthy. Congratulations Adz, Trina & Georgia, we can't wait to meet her :) xxx Today we're headed over to Vancouver Island!! We broke camp around 9am and headed back to North Van. First stop was Canadian Tire to pick up the air filter we'd ordered in for Toby. Then we popped over to UPS to rent a post box. UPS give you a street address as well as the box number, whereas Canada Post just give you the box number. It's the same deal over here where most couriers won't deliver to PO boxes so we went with UPS so that we can still receive parcels if we need to order anything. If anyone wants to send us care packages feel free haha - our address is: PMB # 262 718-333 Brooksbank Avenue, North Vancouver, BC, V7J 3V8 A quick coffee at Macca's and then we were back on the road to Horseshoe Bay. Faaaar out there were some crazies on the road today. One woman kept honking her horn at us from behind (while we were stopped at a green light waiting for the car in front to turn across traffic before we could go). Then she drove up beside us yelling furiously out her window with all kinds of wild hand gestures. She actually looked loopy too - she truly reminded me of Cruella De Vil haha. Then as we were driving down a suburban street another lady whipped open the drivers door of her parked car in front of us, totally oblivious that we were coming down the street a few metres away and could've taken her door off. And just as we were about to get on the highway a woman pulled out of a shop carpark about 5 metres in front of us without even looking what traffic was coming. Lucky Benny was on the ball and saw her... All this within the space of 10 mins - I don't know what was going on, but we couldn't wait to get out of there and were so happy to get to the ferry terminal in one piece. We were early for the 12.30pm ferry so we bought our tickets then joined the queue for the half hour wait with all of the other cars. Once the ferry arrived it only took about 10-15mins for everyone to be loaded on and we were off. The trip from Horseshoe Bay (mainland Van) to Departure Bay (Nanaimo, Vancouver Is) took about 1.5hrs but it seemed so quick. There was a restaurant and cafe onboard so we had lunch and then sat down to make use of their wifi to do the blog and by then we were pretty much arriving.... We stopped at a supermarket to grab some meat & vegies, then checked in at Living Forest Oceanside Campground. At most private campgrounds when you rock up without a reservation they just assign you your site, but here they said go for a drive and pick one that you like, then come back and check in. Haha yep great idea for Mr & Mrs Indecisive here - it only took us 2 loops of the park to choose... It's a private campground but its really big (over 300 campgrounds) and set in 53 acres of forest and riverland so it reminds me a bit of a provincial park. The only real downside is that you look down into the neighbours campgrounds due to the way the hill has been cut to give most sites an ocean view. It's very mild outside as there's no wind so it's perfect to be sitting outside around the campfire, it just feels a bit weird and intrusive to be peering down into the neighbours sites.... Saturday 27.04.13: Happy Birthday Trina :) xx Laundry day. Now we usually just carry our laundry hamper to the on-site laundromat but here it's located down near the office which is a bit of a hike from our campsite. Since it's further away than normal we had planned to ride our bikes down, but then had the problem of how to carry the clothes in the hamper while on bikes? Benny came up with the answer - rig our shopping trolley cart to the back of my bike then pop the clothes in there! It worked a treat, except when I took a corner too sharp and the bag fell off the cart haha. We velcroed the bag back to the cart and we were off again - genius! It sure was a good workout towing it up the hills! They have a great games lounge beside the laundry so we checked that out and grabbed a couple of books/magazines and veged out for the rest of the day. When we first got Toby we bought a temperature gauge to put in the fridge to keep an eye on how much the temperature rises when it's switched off for travelling. As we were going to bed I happened to notice that it didn't feel as cold as normal & the temperature has risen. We checked that Toby is still level (otherwise fridge won't work) and re-started it, so hopefully in the morning it should be cold again. Fingers crossed... Sunday 28.04.13: First thing this morning we checked the fridge and it hasn't cooled overnight which is a b*****. It's a 2 way fridge and was running on electric since we're plugged into power at a campground, so we've switched it over to gas to see if that still works. On the campgrounds' website we'd read about hiking a trail that takes you to a spot that's great for sea lion spotting and sometimes even whale watching - the Cable Bay Trail to Dodd Narrows. It said the hike would take about an hour & the trail was 15mins away from the grounds so we thought we'd give that a go today. Well we got 2km into the walk along main roads & hadn't reached the trail yet before we decided to pull up and check the map... Good thing we did because the trail was still 7km away - I'm betting the website meant it was a 15min DRIVE there haha, it was just written in a bit of a misleading way. Sooo we turned around and headed back to camp - it was a bit annoying but a good bit of exercise there anyhow! Back inside the campgrounds are a few other trails so we headed along the Hydro Trail for a bit and came out at the Nanaimo River. We stopped & were just standing there on the rivers edge looking around when we witnessed the coolest thing. Out of nowhere a bald eagle swooped in from our left down to the river not 5 metres in front of us to grab something out of the water. The 'something' (we assumed a fish) dove under water, so he tucked his legs back in and flew off into the trees. We were both standing there in amazement at what we'd just seen when the 'something' surfaced, swam over to the riverbank and walked out - it was an otter. So I'm not sure whether the otter dove down too far for the eagle and escaped or if the eagle freaked out when he got closer & saw that it wasn't a fish and backed out, but that was our wildlife encounter for the day. Pretty cool :) After that we walked further down the trail, stalking the eagles basically - trying to get some photos, but they were pretty elusive. By the time we got back to camp we'd been gone for over 3 hours and the fridge had cooled down which is great news. At least if its running on gas we can still use it and because it works on one setting & not the other hopefully it should mean that we only need a replacement part & it's not completely broken. We'll have to get it checked out at some stage... Monday 29.04.13: Today was forecast rain but it's clear and sunny so we packed up, checked out of Living Forest and hit the road over to Cable Bay Trail - yep it was about a 15min drive ha. It really is a beautiful day for a walk & the scenery is just gorgeous. It took about 45mins to hike in to Dodd Narrows and when we arrived I can see how the place got its name - it's basically really fast flowing water through a narrow channel. Straight up we saw a group of sea lions playing in the 'rapids' of the channel - so cool. We watched a tugboat come through the channel against the current, that was hard going. The group of sea lions thought it was fun to surf the boats' wake though. We ended up staying here for over 2 hours and watched another couple of boats come through - including one small tug that didn't look like he was going to make it. The sea lions stayed around the whole time, popping up here & there playing in the water. They're such graceful creatures & just mesmerising to watch. We were standing out on the rocks when an otter surfaced and climbed up the rocks. He was just sitting there until Ben moved closer with the camera, then he must've freaked out coz he started hissing at us and dove back into the water. Then he surfaced about 2 metres in front of us, looked around to see we were still there, hissed at us, dove under and surfaced 4 metres to the right. Then he'd pop up, spot us still there, hiss at us, go under again and pop up in a different spot - it was like he was trying to lose us haha, pretty funny. This went on for a few minutes till we decided to move away and leave him in peace. We didn't see any whales but that's ok, we got to see some amazing creatures in their natural habitat so I'm happy! We hiked back to Toby and had some lunch - one of the perks of taking your home everywhere you go ha. Then we stopped in at Nanaimo to grab some supplies and headed roughly 30km north to Parksville and set up camp at Rathtrevor Provincial Park. There was no ranger here to check us in when we arrived, instead they have a self registration process. You just choose your campsite then complete a permit, put it in the envelope with your camp fees, tear off your receipt and pop the envelope in the registration box at the gatehouse. Then the ranger will collect the fees from the box later when he/she comes through. We were a bit disappointed though as we'd planned to buy some firewood from the gatehouse, but there was no-one there... Benny was most upset that we couldn't have a campfire tonight. However about an hour later the ranger ute came around to all the sites with a trailer load of firewood to see if anyone wanted to buy any. Crisis averted - that made Benny's night!!! Turns out the ranger was always coming around, but in the meantime 6 people had rung the emergency number listed at the gatehouse when they couldn't buy any firewood... She couldn't believe it haha. I didn't class it as an emergency, we were just going to go without a fire for one night.... So we got the campfire going and after dinner finally got to toast marshmallows!!! They're ok but not as nice as I remember them as a kid - I still like the act of toasting them much better than eating them!! Tuesday 30.04.13: Bad news today - we've finally run out of Vegemite!!!! We've squeezed and squeezed some more and our little tube is definitely empty.... I'm cursing myself for not buying the biggest jar possible before we came instead of a little travel-friendly tube at the airport. What am I going to do for breakfast now???? You can buy it at select shops over here but it's about $8 for the small jar and the 'scrooge' in me just refuses to pay that haha. We'll see how long I last now that we've run out though.... Second lot of bad news is that Benny chipped his tooth at breakfast. Actually we don't know how he did it, just that after brekky it felt 'funny' so he grabbed a mirror and checked it out, and now a chunk of it is missing... So we'll have to look into dentistry sometime soon - the good news is that it's one of his wisdom teeth & not causing him any pain at the moment... There's no-one camped around us - half the campground is still closed due to it still being low season. There'd be lucky to be 20 sites occupied so its very quiet and peaceful - in fact before I was up this morning Ben spotted 2 deer wandering in the campsite across from us. It's pretty cold in our site as we don't get much sun due to the huge tall shady trees, so we went for a bike ride to explore & warm up a bit. The park is pretty big - the campground alone has 174 campsites plus a huge picnicking area along the beach with 5 parking lots. Hey Ben here, I thought it was about time to have a go at this blog writing thing, so I've taken over! Loz has pretty much covered a lot of our stay at Rathtrevor beach so I won't elaborate too much but we saw the deer again just cruisin though the camp ground. It's probably nothing special to see them for the locals but we don't see many of them at home so it's pretty cool! I guess its like us seeing kangaroos all the time at home. We also saw squirrel munging out on a pine nut on a stump next to Toby, kinda reminded us of the movie ice age! I decided to do a bit of maintenance on Toby today and changed out the air filter which was a good idea because it looked like it hadn't been changed for a fair while! Hopefully we might pick up a few extra km's out of a tank of gas! After all the "hard" work it was time to stoke up the fire and have a beer! Much love till next time, Loz AND Benny hehe :) xxxxxxx