Well, we’re back in the good ole USA!! We had a great time in Canada (Canadia as Viktoria refers to it...I mean, people who are from there are Canadian, right?) We really enjoyed Vancouver Island thoroughly, but it’s also very good to be back. We did more things in 5 days on the island then our host family had done in 5 years of living there, so I think we pretty much squeezed all we could out of it. We went back to Buttle Lake twice, which is a huge and gorgeous alpine lake in the middle of the island with a very peaceful and amazing campground right along the shores. We just had to go back for a second round, and this time we brought our swim suits and got in the water, it was great! We also discovered Upana Caves over by the town of Gold River. These caves were the most exciting spelunking we’ve ever done as a family. The temperature that day was in the upper 80’s, but inside the cave it was down in the 40’s or 50’s because the caves go as far as 2000 feet into the earth and a nice cool breeze is always moving through them. Jackets, sturdy shoes, and flashlights are required because it’s wet, cool, and very dark inside. Rebecca, of course, opted for a camera flash as her light! :-) That actually created a pretty cool effect in the pics, though, because you can see all the droplets of water seeping out of the cave ceilings and they look like diamonds in the pics. The kids lead us through some very narrow black crawl spaces and into a huge opening where we felt like we had passed over into the Land of the Lost. There was a lush green pocket of forest with a waterfall and lots of cool exploring that we ended up coming upon after going several hundred yards through the dark cave...it was WAY cool! In this secret garden we also found an igneous intrusion (rock talk) which had actually turned into marble, so we carried out tons of marble souvenirs. We had a great time in the caves....not a soul around and all the tunnels were open for exploring, no guided tours and “do not touch” signs.
We also learned a few things in Canada:
Sand Dollars are black, purple, or charcoal grey when they are alive. See the pic above of the sand dollar Clint found while playing in Miracle Beach.
Vancouver doesn’t know the meaning of the word “freeway”!! All the labeled “highways” are actually city streets with pedestrian crosswalks and twists and turns that zig zag their way through heavily populated residential areas! Don’t plan on getting anywhere fast in Vancouver!! It’s insane!
NEVER....EVER try to drive across the US Border again! If there is anything so important that it requires us to go to Canada or Mexico in this post-9/11 world, we will FLY from now on!! It took us a whole 5 minute wait, then another casual 5 minute conversation with a Canadian border guard to get IN to Canada, but we wasted over 4 hours of our lives just trying to get back into the US. It was HORRIBLE! And it was only after all the waiting that the border guard got his hands on us and told us we were bad, bad people because we were trying to transport firewood into the US....that almost caused us to be rejected and sent back into Canada to try again another day.
Anyway, after two stressful and horribly slow days of travel, we finally arrived at our cabin in Glacier National Park and here we are today about to go exploring. We are very excited. Wish us luck with the bears. I was just told at the campground office that there was a brown bear in our campground last night.
