Trains and Grizzly Bears, A Canadian Roadtrip - Tofino Day 2

Friday, September 20

It was foggy and overcast when we woke up this morning, but that’s typical beach weather so we didn’t know what to expect for the day as there were several conflicting weather reports.  After getting up and ready to go, we headed back up to Tofino as Val had seen a couple of shops she wanted to visit.  We found a prime parking spot and spent the morning walking around and visiting the shops.  The sun began to break through and it looked like it might be a nice day and the temperature was very mild.

The view from our window shows clouds and fog, but blue sky starting to break through.

We had skipped breakfast again and decided to get something to eat so we went to the Common Loaf Bakery and Café.  We think we had eaten there on a previous trip, but weren’t sure.  It was crowded, but after ordering we saw someone leaving and we grabbed their table.  They had some delicious looking pastries, but we wanted a sandwich.  They said the kitchen was really backed up and it would take 15 or 20 minutes to get our food, but they had some premade sandwiches so we opted for those.  They were very good and we enjoyed our lunch.  We walked around a bit more after lunch and while Val visited a couple of shops, I walked down to one of the docks and took some pictures.

Some views of the Tofino harbor area.

 

We met back at the car and headed down to the park to do a little hiking.  The first place we went was Wickaninnish Beach where we took some pictures, but to be honest, we are staying on a more picturesque beach.

From the beach we decided to take a short walk on the bog trail, which was pretty, but not very interesting.

After the bog trail we moved on down the road and decided to take another short trail through the rain forest.  It was much more interesting and much more beautiful than the bog trail, but although it wasn’t very long, there were a lot of stairs and it seemed like we were endlessly climbing up and down as the boardwalk trail followed the contours of the forest.  Val’s two knee replacements have allowed her walk without much pain, but the up and down of all the stairs were very hard on her and she was very glad so see the end of the trail.  For that matter, so was I as I got pretty tired of all the stairs myself, we’re starting to feel our age.

I found a pair of the Adirondack chairs I wrote about in an earlier blog post, and rested my tired legs.

 

It was late afternoon by the time we finished our hike so we decided to head on back to the hotel and enjoy our time here.  It was an absolutely beautiful day on the beach when we returned so we spent some time on our balcony before Val decided to rest a bit and I decided I had better catch up on the blog.

We had dinner reservations for 6:00 so after too short of a rest, we were off to dinner.  We decided to have a lighter dinner than we had on our first night so we each had a bowl of seafood chowder and we split a flatbread.  The chowder was great, but the flatbread although good, was not great.  We had seats by the window again and watched the sun on its way down while we ate.

After we finished dinner, the sun hadn’t set yet so I decided to go down and take some pictures.  It was a beautiful evening so I walked up to north end of the beach again where there is a little inlet that I hoped to catch the sun setting in, but unfortunately the rocks on the north side of the inlet blocked the view of the sun.  I walked back towards the main hotel taking many pictures on the way.  There were a lot of people on the beach enjoying the evening and lots of surfers in the water.  I never knew that surfing was so popular here.

There has been a beautiful sunset every night we've been here and I haven't tired of photographing them.  There wasn't the really colorful clouds, but what I liked was the ripples of sand with water between them catching the warm light of the sunset.  As you can see, I took plenty of pictures.

I returned to the room and we went to bed early as we have an early morning tomorrow.  At dinner we heard somebody discussing road closures so we asked the waitress about it.  She told us the delay we experienced coming in was continuous with the road being closed hours at a a time.  She told us to check the “Drivebc” website and we found a full explanation of the closures.  They do indeed close the road for two to four hour blocks mostly at night and early morning, but also on some afternoons.  At all other times, they only let traffic through once an hour and since we had reservations on the ferry back to the mainland tomorrow, we decided we had better get up early to make sure we weren’t delayed.

Tomorrow it’s back to the mainland and on to the city of Abbotsford on the outskirts of Vancouver where we’ll spend the night.