Our Western Canada Vacation - Part 3

This part contains May 15th & 16th.

The seventh day of our trip started off rough.  One of our two coolers is a kind that gets plugged in, and it can either heat or cool.  The night before when we'd plugged it in in our hotel room, we'd accidentally plugged it in to heat.  All of our food in that cooler got hot.  Although we'd eaten all our goat cheese samples from the day before, we had not opened the packages of gouda and marble cheddar that I was so looking forward to.  The cheese was melted; the plastic around it warm and soft.  We chucked them.  Before leaving on our trip, I had made a lot of food to eat on the way.  A bunch of it was in the other cooler or had already got eaten, but I had jars of cream of potato soup in that cooler that we threw out.  Other food was either thrown out as well or salvaged.  Needless to say, this day we ended up hitting a Superstore to stock up on groceries.

This day the main tourist-y thing we did was go to the Butterfly Gardens in Victoria, BC.  We had been here on our honeymoon ten years ago and wanted to come back again.  If you have never been here, it is a tropical building filled with lots of plants, flowers, and trees, some water features, lots of free-flying butterflies, a few birds like parrots and flamingos, and some lizards and turtles.  It's hot and humid, and relaxing to walk around or just sit and let the butterflies land on you :)

Butterfly on my shoulder :)

This fellow made the sweetest sounds!

There was lots of traffic in Victoria, BC but I had been admiring the wildflowers on the sides of the roads and that finally gave me time to grab a few pictures of the prolific yellow Scotch Broom (I hear it's invasive); what looked to me like orange poppies; and purple lupine.

We stayed in Nanaimo, BC for the night and the next day started driving to our main destination, Ucluelet, BC.  First we went to the country market in Coombs where they have goats on the grass roof.  Only the goats weren't on the roof when we were there :(  I was very disappointed.  Anyway, the place was busy and really neat!  And we found marble goat milk cheddar cheese!  Hubby got himself a cinnamon bun and we picked up a Christmas gift for a relative.  Next we went to Little Qualicum Falls.

We spent a lot of time at the falls, so we had to skip lunch (we'd planned to picnic) and just snack as we drove, and we also had to skip the place we'd planned to visit next.  Then for a while we drove around trying to find some planes Hubby wanted to see, but we were on the wrong road.  (We were able to do both things on our way back a few days later.)  The highway to Ucluelet was narrow and very twisty and steep; I found it scary.  We saw a couple black bears.  We then arrived at Terrace Beach Resort.  At first I found the resort and cabin a little bit of a disappointment, and I was somewhat worried totally freaked to be in tsunami area. (For those of you who don't know where Ucluelet is, we were right on the west side of Vancouver Island, near Tofino.)

Most bow-legged bear I've ever seen, lol.

Terrace Beach Resort offices and rooms.  The cabins and beach are behind this area.

Our cabin - "Surf Grass" - in the center.

Downstairs.  It had a full bathroom, kitchenette, eating/living areas, and the back deck overlooking the bay had a bbq and hot tub on it.

Upstairs.  It had a half bathroom, queen bed, and small walkway leading to a jacuzzi tub.

 We spent three nights here.

 Please come back to read the fourth part tomorrow :)