Maiden Voyage: Gabriola Island

Mark and some of our friends spent lots of time last weekend fixing up the wiring in the Boler. The signal lights were all wonky, but in the end they got it 95% fixed so we took the Boler on our first trip and....

Dum-da-da-DUM!! It was a success!!

We decided to take a weekend trip to Gabriola Island, which is maybe 2 1/2 hours away. We went in that particular direction because it would take us over the Malahat Mountain, which would be a really really good test of how the little pick-up truck performs with the Boler bouncing along behind it. Oh, and also, we live on the very southern tip of a skinny, tall island and that was the only direction we could possibly have travelled for more than two hours without hitting water.

We slowed down a bit at some of the steep parts of the mountain, but it was nothing out of the ordinary and definitely nothing to panic about, so the test was a huge success and I don't think we'll be (deliberately) taking a steeper route than that at any point on the road trip to Mexico, so all is well.

Gabriola Island was really nice.


Here is the FIRST shot of our FIRST road trip with our beloved Boler!! This was in Nanaimo, waiting for the ferry to take us to Gabriola. I felt all cool, because we could just relax in the boler while waiting in line, lounging around the dinette table & having a snack, in perfect comfort.

We set up camp in Descanso Bay once we got to Gabriola Island. See that huge hangy-downy part of the awning? Total surprise to us. We'd never unravelled it before and we both assumed that it was a normal awning with maybe a little teensy bit of a flap hanging down, but this was the flap to end all flaps. It adds more privacy and is also probably a really good weatherbreak for when the Boler's door is open.

The campground was beautiful and right on top of some really nice beaches and bays. Other than the loud group of people who pulled in late Friday night and decided it was time to party with their car stereos blasting, it was fine. They actually provided us with entertainment more than annoyance. We couldn't hear them from the site we chose except for at first when they had the music extra-loud, but there were two sites really near the party site that each had families with kids in them, and I felt kinda bad for them. The park employees had a "talk" with the young guys the first night and they shut the hell up after that happened, but I could hear them from the out-house (which was close to where they were) Saturday night too. Poor families with kids.

Sunday morning, bright and early, I was making my way to the out-house when I heard "COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!!" It was an unexpected thing to hear in the middle of the woods on a Sunday morning, especially considering that it wasn't actually a rooster, but a child. It turns out that the kids had been yelling this over and over all morning at the top of their lungs. I think it was revenge on the loud, and by this time hung over, party group. For the rest of the morning whenever we ventured near that end of the park we could hear them yelling it - especially whenever there was any sort of noise from the party group. A car door slams? COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!! A hung over party guy woops or hollers? COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!! A person emerges from a tent at the party site? COCK-A-DOODLE-DOO!! And the magic part was, those stupid hung over people couldn't say a word to those little kids, or they'd have the deadly wrath of protective parents swooping down upon them.

I get a big kick out of watching human interaction, and this was a fine performance. You guys all know how much I love loud stupid parties (not at all, especially in the woods where it should be peaceful and pretty) so I was totally on the side of the families and found it funny that the little kids go the last word.

ANYWAY. We met lots of nice people during the weekend, but we also poked around in the woods and at the shore quite a bit. Gabriola has lots of neat sandstone formations, like this one that Mark is climbing around in. He bonked his head off it pretty good. He bent over right after he ricocheted off it and I thought for a second he was gonna fall over or something, but he was mostly okay.



I think this one looks like a mushroom.



Arlo didn't seem to mind being in the Boler. He has his own little single bed in there, but I was worried he wouldn't use it because it's got a table right on top of it. I thought he might be nervous to climb into the space between the bed and the table because he couldn't stand up straight in there, but he scooted in and was content enough to sleep there, which really shouldn't have surprised me. That dog doesn't spook at anything.

He had lots of adventures on the beach. He got very involved with digging up sand. He'd dig a hole, smoosh his nose right down into it, sniff, then snort because he'd sniffed in sand and/or salt water, and frantically dig some more.



Arlo found and tormented a starfish until we made him stop.




He found some crabs but he couldn't catch them. He caught a smaller one elsewhere on the beach and licked it right up, but I think it pinched him because he spit it out again.



Take a close look here: Arlo is putting his entire snout underwater in an attempt to find some treasure. That's saltwater, too. Yuck. He did this a few times, so he either didn't learn from his mistakes or didn't mind saltwater in his nose and mouth. Either that or the treasures were REALLY worth it.


I can't even think of what else we did, but our trip felt like it was waaaay longer than two days (in a good way). We had fun despite the rain we got on Saturday morning. We drove all around while it was raining and managed to get lost for a long time. Keep in mind we had a map and the entire island is only about 8 miles long. It was fun getting lost - our map was about four years old, but it seemed as though they had taken out some roads instead of, as one would expect, adding new ones since the map had been printed. We'd be trying to get to the end of one road because it connected with another that we needed to get on, and the paved road would turn into a nicely graded gravel road. The gravel road would suddenly get much narrower and then get all bumpy and unkempt, and then we'd suddenly be parked in someone's driveway or in the bushes or something, and the road would be behind us, but certainly not in front of us. This happened many times. We finally got away from the region of disappearing roads and went to the other side of the island, where everyone had politely left all the roads where they belonged.

On Sunday we finally drove back to the ferry terminal and wandered over to the bar for some coffee. While sitting outside, drinking our coffee like responsible adults, we noticed something fun. Do you see the rock wall behind the building? Do you see the bars that are attached to the rock wall?


I thought they might have been put there to climb on. I climbed on them.


They were pretty good bars.