Furry Goodness

Back on the boat, and heading for Vancouver Island again. It's something like 70% of the size of New Zealand's North Island, of which much is forest. And it has a tetanus outbreak gestating, apparently. Lucky we've both had recent bike carnage, then, or we'd be in need of a booster before heading into their woods. As it stands we're fine, but it did get us thinking about hepatitis and other exotic nasties, which we summarily failed to factor in during our trip (non-)planning phase. So, Hep-A immunizations await us on our return to Vancouver, which should make for amusing viewing as the equation for Nene tends to be something like: needle + blood = fall over sideways.

The second fat man to perch himself on the lifeboat storage locker outside our window has just been driven off by the rising windchill; we're picking up speed as we head into the Strait of Georgia. We arrived at the Tsawassen ferry terminal at 1230pm, which was pretty much bang on (revised) schedule despite minor lostness along the way. Not getting lost wouldn't have helped us get on the 1pm sailing, though, as not only was it full, the subsequent (3pm) sailing was already at 60% capacity. So, we sat and we read, and we reorganised some of our stuff, and we wrote, and ate, and chatted, and made lists of things we need and things we should do, and pretty soon our lane (41) was on the move onto the ferry.

We decided to come back to the Island for a number of reasons, including my sister's boyfriend's mechanical aptitude and the abundance of mountain-bike and hiking trails. Insofar as we've planned things, we're looking at a couple of days in Victoria, which will hopefully culminate in a sweeter-running and ready-for-action van-of-doom, then off into the wilderness. Our non-planning is such that we haven't yet looked at whether we're hitting the West Coast before hooking back up to the North, or whether we leave the West for another trip. Either way, we'll likely be hopping a boat back to the mainland in a week or two, and it'll probably be either Nanaimo - Horseshoe Bay or one of the ferries from Comox to places we haven't been yet. I think Nene's hoping we'll end up finding a place where I'm not such a knob, but I think we all know just how likely that is.

There are a lot of moustaches in this part of the world, some of which are awesome. Over here, though, it seems to be the men who have them.