A RAINY DAY, AGAIN.
Day 253 – It was warm and humid last night, and we actually slept with a couple of windows open – oh, and it’s the first day of summer. It makes sense now, grin. It rained lightly last night and some during the day. After lunch, we drove into the closest town, Qualicum Beach, about 15 minutes from the campground.
The reason we went to Qualicum Beach was to find the local library and see if we had a good internet connection from their parking lot. The connection at this campground is not very good – sporadic and very slow – and that’s better than what we’ve had the past two weeks. But tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. camping reservations open for British Columbia campground arrival dates beginning in two months. We need to have a good, fast connection in order to “compete” for a campsite at a Park beginning August 22nd.
We’d never been to this area before and were pleasantly surprised by Qualicum Beach. A really cute city with nice houses on tree-lined streets, all of them with colorful landscaping, it reminded us of parts of Victoria. The library was located in Old Town near these homes and surrounded by cute coffee houses, health stores, trendy cafes, and streets that would make you want to walk around and window shop. Two blocks from there was the beach and the Ocean.
After checking on the signal near the library (it was good), we drove to the Ocean and parked. We spent some time at the Visitor’s Center. The lady working there gave us some good information on things to do, where to eat, etc. It turned out she had moved to Qualicum Beach from Tofino, the place we are camping next, so we got good information about Tofino and the west coast of Vancouver Island, also. It was cloudy and drizzly out so we didn’t take any pictures, but we’ll be going back to Qualicum Beach.
We drove north along the coast, sightseeing, before turning back to Route 4 and heading back to the campground. We checked out the Day Use Area, which is just beyond the camping areas. There are some nice trails leading to two viewpoints looking down on the River and the waterfalls. We will go back in a day or two when the sun is out. We spent the rest of the afternoon going over the brochures and pamphlets we picked up at the Visitor’s Center.