Cowabunga Cowichan!

Took a last minute trip over to the island this weekend, and brought Steve over for the ride. We took the Horseshoe Bay ferry over to Departure Bay in Nanaimo (my first time taking this ferry) and spent the night at a Travel Lodge on Saturday. Just after dining out at the Red Room Tapas Restaurant, in which we were "entertained" by a lounge/jazz quintet on stage, we walked across the street to the harbour to catch the fireworks inaugurating the 40th Annual Bathtub Race that was set to begin the next day. I guess this is what small town folks do for fun. In our drive around Nanaimo, we couldn't find anything of great interest.

Jen caught the ferry over the next morning to join us for tubing down the Cowichan river. She had taken the early morning ferry, however, and arrived at our hotel hours ahead of schedule. She had a friendly lady offer her to take her from the ferry terminal to our hotel as well, which saved me from having to fetch her myself.

The drive down to Duncan before making a right westbound towards the river was nothing spectacular. Once you've seen fields of burnt grass and dirt, you've seen them all.

I was trying to co-ordinate with Jamie, James, and the VSC so that we could all go tubing together, but they were still well behind us and we didn't want to waste the few hours of lead time sitting around waiting for their arrival. As it turned out, Steve grew up in Cowichan and knew the area well. His grandparents lived on a property right on the river, so we paid them a visit and launched our tubes from their dock. The cheap $5 neon pink and green tubes I had brought along wasn't suffice for the excursion, so I borrowed a real inner tube made of much thicker rubber.

Floating down the river, letting the current take me long, brought me joy. I found a small plastic wheel about 2" in diameter floating down the river with us. I picked it up and used it for playing catch between the three of us. We lost it in the rapids a few times early on, but it came drifting along and stayed with us until we lost it for good towards the last leg of the journey. That's when I made a rude off-handed comment towards Jen, loud enough for Steve to hear, that we should use the spare tyre around Jen as a replacement. Not a moment too soon, the two of them teamed up and successfully flipped me off the tube and dunk me into the waters. I deserved it. All in good fun. Even at the cost of losing the left side of my expensive Kazuo Kawasaki clip-on sunglasses to my prescription glasses. Grr...

Flopped out on our tubes, the three of us drifted for about 90 minutes until we dismounted at "Little Beach". We would have loved to go again, but being mindful of the ferry schedule, we didn't have time.

While Steve and I had to head back to the mainland tonight as we both had work to do the next day, Jen has Mondays off so she wanted to bum around Victoria, so I dropped her off with a tourist map of the downtown core before heading up to Swartz Bay.