Long Beach vacation day 2
Sunday October 11, 2009.
Today I tried to catch up with some of the Victoria tourism I had planned. The two main items on my itinerary for today were the Butchart Gardens and the Butterfly Gardens right next door.
Butchart Gardens was smaller than I remember, but then I was a lot smaller last time I was there. Rewarding though, and I got some good pictures, but too many to upload over the wireless from where I am right now; I’ll post them to the gallery after I return home.
Butterfly Gardens was a bit of a disappointment, but only because I’ve recently been to the Vancouver Aquarium, which also has butterflies on exhibit. Butterfly Garden had two or three species not represented at VanAqua, but that’s not enough to get me excited about it.
After that I went to Russell Books; I missed them yesterday, but luckily they were also open today. Got there about an hour before closing, but they’ve got so much stuff I could spend a whole afternoon browsing. Did come away with:
- “The Art of Science Fiction” by Frank Kelly Freas
- “Revolutionary” by S. Andrew Swann
- “Engines of Creation” by K. Eric Drexler
- “The Singularity is Near” by Ray Kurzweil
- “The Demon-Haunted World” by Carl Sagan
That last is a second copy; I’m currently reading this book, and it has a sufficient combination of rarity and value that I picked up a second copy to give to someone. I don’t know who I’m going to give it to yet (speak up if you want it), but I think it’s a must-read for anyone who has trouble drawing the line between fact and fiction or between science and faith, or for anyone who interacts with people who have those troubles.
By then it was supper time so I met up with Mike and we went out to a local color joint called John’s Place and had a good meal and chat, then went to look at a few nighttime sights before calling it a day.
Today’s GPS track, with internal foot-tour detail of the Butchart Gardens:
[gmap type=”satellite” width=”80%” zoom=”auto” center=”files” file=’__UPLOAD__/2009/10/20091011.kmz’]
Long Beach vacation day 1
Saturday October 10, 2009:
Today is the first day of my much-anticipated trip to Long Beach. Though actually I’m first going to Victoria to chill with some homies and do some commerce and rubbernecking I didn’t get to last time.
I had originally planned to hit the awesome Ooh La La confectionary for some treats to take to the beach with me, and then maybe also visit Miniature World, Russell Books and one of the naval museums in Victoria.
Alas, twas not to be. Yesterday one of the larger ferries doing the Vancouver->Victoria run suffered a fire in a backup generator and was taken out of service for repairs. That plus this being a long weekend resulted in this:
Thankfully Mike gave me a heads-up that it might be busy, so I skipped breakfast and went right to the ferry terminal in the morning. I arrived at Tsawassen at about 9:20am and was told that I might get on the noon boat, but more likely would be on the 1pm boat. So I settled in for a four-hour wait; walked around a bit, had a snack and did some reading.
Noon came and went with no movement in my lane. The 1pm boat caused some movement but I didn’t get on. That was a bit of a miff, because the missing boat left a gap in the schedule and the next one wouldn’t be until 3pm. Tired of reading, I broke out the laptop and was going to blog furiously, but I couldn’t figure out how to get out of the local WAP after connecting. So I just did some hacking on one of my projects instead. Books and laptops are a great boon to the bored.
Finally got on the 3pm boat. Arrived in Victoria around 5:30pm, which was too late to do any of the things I wanted to do; everything closes at an unreasonable time here.
Went to Mike & Kate’s pad and had delicious homemade chicken korma. Caught up with same, met and adored the family pets, and called it a night.
(nb: I wasn’t able to get the wireless working at Mike’s place either, which is why I’m a few days behind in blogging this trip.)
Today’s GPS track:
[gmap type=”satellite” width=”80%” zoom=”auto” center=”files” file=’__UPLOAD__/2009/10/20091010.kmz’]
Offroad adventure
I wanted to relate a rather exciting bit of travel I did a couple of weeks back; it was what finally gelled the idea of getting this blog going as a place to travel-blog, since I have two travel adventures being planned right now (Long Beach next week, and cross-Canada in 2011).
How this all got started was that last year, I went to the Granville Island Market and there looked at the wares of a local photographer who was selling her photos as cards and framed prints. One of her photos was a picture of some dead tree stumps projecting from and reflecting in the still water of a mountain lake. I really liked it and asked her the location. Turns out it was taken at Stave Lake, which is the reservoir of a hydroelectric dam just northeast of Mission, B.C. If you look at the lake on Google Earth you can even see the many acres of drowned trees.
Then more recently my co-worker Ted mentioned having taken his kids on a tour of the old power station at Stave Lake. Having recently developed an interest in local industrial history, I decided to combine these two temptations into an excuse to finally go check the location out. I went to the power station (photos here) and then took a dirt road up the west side of the lake. That turned out to be a disappointment because it wasn’t very scenic and was full of offroaders. Looking more closely at the Globe of Google when I got home, it looked like I should be able to get down to the eastern shore via some logging roads on the other side of the lake. So I resolved to go back later.
Went back on the weekend of September 19th. First, let’s exercise WordPress’s Google Maps plugin with my GPS track (also downloadable here):
[gmap file=’http://www.soleillapierre.ca/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/GPS_20090919.kmz’]
I omitted the long road between here and home for brevity.
I ended up not finding a road that led to the water. Turns out I got pretty close before the paths I chose petered out, but the undergrowth looked pretty thick and I didn’t want to go traipsing through possibly bear- and hunter-infested woods. Further up the hill there were lots of people practicing target-shooting by the side of the road. Looking at the GPS track later, I was a lot closer to the water than I thought. I intend to go back and try again sometime.
Here’s what the roads looked like at their best. Not too bad, but not passable by the average car – you can’t tell from this photo, but at regular intervals there were some very big speed bump / drainage channel things that would bottom out most cars.
Note the lack of trees near the road. From the Google Maps view above, you’d think this road went through dense forest. I discovered this to be shock when I got home and re-examined the area; the default view in Google Earth is actually the oldest image they have of the area. If you bring up the history slider and move it back just one notch, you’ll see the true state of the deforestation in the area. It was disappointing to realize this, and also annoying since I was making plans based on information that turned out to be wrong; the actual passability of the roads in this area is radically different from what the default GE view shows.
I actually ended up driving in a stream for about 200 feet. One of the trails I followed in trying to get to the shore led right into a stream, and then back out. Unfortunately it became impassable for me right after that, so I had to turn around.
Along one of these roads I spotted a rusted-out car wreck in the woods:
It’s easy to sneer at someone for taking a small car on these trails, but really I was being a bit foolish too – although my vehicle can be made into a semi-decent offroader, it’s currently tricked out for city and highway driving; my tires especially are not suitable for these muddy, rocky and sometimes water-covered roads. I could easily have got stuck too.
Having failed in several attempts to reach the shore, I decided to go up instead. I wanted to see if I could get high enough up the logging roads to get a good vista of the Fraser Valley.
Unfortunately the roads leading up turned out to be less passable than they appear on the (outdated) GE view. For one thing, there were some wooden bridges with low weight limit warnings on them – I had to search around to find out what my GVW was in order to determine if it was safe (it was) before crossing. Two of the three branches that appeared promising on GE were now impassable due to overgrowth or roadblocks, and the third – after some massive bumps that I scraped bottom on – led to this:
Looks more like a small landslide than a deliberate roadblock. Either way, while I have four-wheel drive I don’t have enough of it to get past that. And I couldn’t back out because those aforementioned big bumps would have taken my muffler off. So I had to turn around in place.
Except that in the muddy area earlier I had put on big rubber boots to test the depth of some of the puddles. When I was halfway turned around I accidentally pressed the gas pedal at the same time as the brake and very nearly drove off the edge. That gave me quite a fright.
Overall it was pretty fun though – it was a new experience to go crawling around rocky and muddly mountain trails in 4L gear, barely making 5 km/h and not wanting to go faster because it was so bumpy. Some nice scenery.
Never did get exactly the pictures I wanted, but I intend to go back some day. Now that I discovered the Google Earth Conspiracy, I can see more accurate views of the area and I think I’ve spotted a trail that does go down to the shore.
