We had a late start to the day. We have both started to warm to our hillside cottage which seems to float in a cloud of birch, madrone, and Douglas fir trees. Of course, having cable TV also makes it harder to get going in the morning. We now have opinions on a whole variety of Canadian political issues which we had never even heard about a week ago.
We took a drive around the north end of Salt Spring Island. If the south end, near Burgoyne Bay, seems to have attracted the old hippies, the north end has attracted the investment bankers and law firm partners. There are lots and lots of stunning homes nestled in the trees above the rocky shores. Most have docks where you can park your yacht should you decide that the ferry from Vancouver is just not classy enough!
I found this cool looking rock on the beach. Sadly, it broke in the car.
We found another beach on the east side of the island where there were a number of dogs already frolicking on the beach. We pulled off and let ours join theirs.
We did have to beat a bit of a retreat when Edie ran into the woman throwing the stick. She had bad knees and was not happy about it. She was also absurdly possessive of a couple sticks she had found on the beach and felt that only her dogs should be interested in chasing them.
We boarded the ferry for Pender Island in the mid-afternoon. After a while, the novelty of taking pictures from the ferry and of the ferry wears off, and the Queen of Nanaimo is not the most luxuriously craft in the BC Ferries fleet. We decided to just make a day trip to Pender and return late at night. All the guidebooks suggest skipping North Pender and driving directly to South Pender. The two islands were once one island joined by an isthmus until enterprising Victorians decided that every isthmus needed a canal. So now you take a one-lane bridge from one island to the other. But, before we reached the bridge, John decided to pull off at a cemetery and look around. I found this a bit perplexing since our time was short, but as always he proved to be right. There were some fabulous headstones here:
I hope I never meet up with those Pender Island Dachshunds….
We were looking for Beaumont Marine Provincial Park, but we never found it. Instead, we discovered this exquisite little cove with stunning views of Mount Baker and Orca Island. We stayed there for a couple hours, and for most of that time we had it to ourselves. I read Tent of Blue to John and Eli got thoroughly soaked retrieving his ball from the water time and time again.
After this, we stopped at Poets Cove resort for dinner. This place had come highly recommended in the guidebooks. It’s basically a partial ownership place, but they rent out cottages and rooms when they are not in use by the owners or if they have not yet been sold. The entire place was pretty dog friendly.
Make that deer-friendly, too, because these garden destroyers seemed to have the idea that this place belonged to them. The full-time residents of these islands do not like deer, but I suppose that the management of Poets Cove decided that the cost of replacing plants was more than equaled by the photographs that city tourists would take with the animals.
We had a leisurely supper at the patio restaurant. They have a fancier restaurant, but we decided we were not quite dressy enough for it nor did we want to spend that much. The food was good and it was nice to just sit and look at the boats in the harbor and the sunset. After dinner, we walked up and down the docks looking at the boats. There were some that even hailed from Newport Beach and North Carolina!
We made sure, speaking of boats, that we were back in Otter Bay in time to catch the last ferry of the day. It was the dumpy old Queen of Nanaimo again, but it took us back to Salt Spring in no time at all.
Tomorrow, on to Victoria!
