TRAVEL DAY
From: Little Qualicum Falls Provincial Park, Lower Campground, British Columbia.
To: Long Beach Golf Course Campground, Tofino, British Columbia.
Day 259 – We were up early again this morning to make a reservation at a campground that just opened for reservations today. We got the campsite we wanted for two months from now. It was 58 degrees and sunny. We are going to the west coast, back into the land of fog and cooler temperatures.
We departed Little Qualicum Falls Provincial Park at 10:15 a.m. A half hour later we stopped in Port Alberni to dump tanks and get gas in the RV. There was a line at the dump station; we were back on the road in ½ hour.
The scenery was fantastic with thick forests on both sides of the fairly narrow two-lane highway. Tall, lush ferns covered the bottom of the woods. At times the sunlight filtered through the forests. Really pretty! There were lakes, rivers, and streams flowing between snow-capped mountains. The road was quite curvy and it was rough at times. Between the ups & downs of the hills and the winding road, it was hard to take pictures. We saw signs warning of road work ahead; good, the road needed it.
Traffic came to a halt and the two-lane road turned into a narrow one-lane road. There was already a line up of vehicles stopped in front of us. We waited and waited. Finally, a LONG line of cars came through from the other direction. Good! Now it will be our turn. Wrong! We waited and waited some more. People got out of their cars and wandered around. People got bored and antsy. Still waiting. After we’d waited over 45 minutes without moving, it was time for our line-up to go ahead. We think the total wait in line for the first cars in our line probably was 1 hour. The cars slowly began to move along, not picking up much speed. As we came limping around a bend we saw why – this was major road work!
As we approached the coast it was cool with fog and very windy, a complete change from this morning. We arrived at our new campground at 1:40 p.m. It was 61 degrees. We checked in and received warnings about bears in the campground – “please don’t leave anything out that might attract the bears; we drive around the campground often to check and will remove anything that is left out”. This warning isn’t a big problem for us and others in trailers big enough to store their goods, but for tenters and teeny campers, having to take everything out and put it up continually would be a drag. We passed signs on the way to our site warning of both bears and wolves in the campground.
We filled our tank with drinking water (located very conveniently across from our campsite) and pulled in to site #2. We hadn’t eaten lunch yet, so first we let the girls out and we all had lunch. We did not put the screened tent up since it was supposed to rain tonight and the next day and a half. We had a good campsite, surrounded by nice trees and reasonably private. There are no hook-ups, no dump station, but water is available at sinks near our site.
We made a Lemon Pesto Garlic pasta sauce and had that for dinner over Egg Noodles with Shrimp and Garlic Bread. This campground is next to a golf course, but most of the people camping here are not golfers; they are surfers. All kinds of surfing are big in Tofino. We are at Long Beach Golf Course Campground, outside the town of Tofino, near the area’s airport. We will be here a week. The campground was surprisingly busy, for a Monday.