Yvon and I went to Vancouver Island for a trip in April and May 2016. Many of the photos from the trip are in the Victoria gallery. This gallery has photos from the city of Nanaimo itself, but more are from our stay on the west coast of the island, including Ucluelet, Tofino and Pacific Rim National Park. My birthday night was spent in Nanaimo, and we had lovely appetizers at the Modern Cafe in the central city. Our stay in Ucluelet with side trips to Pacific Rim and Tofino was quite magical, hot and sunny, lots of walking trails, good food, sunsets, big trees.
Photo List (Total 266 Photos)
Click bolded headers below to view, or click "just the best" for quick tour
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Nanaimo City (58 photos) - I spent my birthday evening in Nanaimo. We did a quick tour of city city in the relative gloom of a cloudy early evening, but managed some retakes a few days later on our way to the airport, so the gallery is an intermingling of sunny and cloudy photos. The gallery starts at the water and moves up the hill to the Old City Quarter, near the former train station. I had heard negative things about Nanaimo, but I found the downtown to have some interest due to the irregular pattern of streets, quite a few larger buildings for a city this size, and buildings hinting at a thriving cultural life.
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Drive Across the Island to the West Coast (60 photos) - This gallery has everything that we took photos of between Nanaimo and Ucluelet, which includes some logging roads, mountain views, Little Qualicum Falls Provincial Park, Cathedral Grove in MacMillan Provincial Park, some shots of Port Alberni where we had lunch, and a few random shots from the Pacific Rim Highway.
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Ucluelet (45 photos) - We stayed in better-than-average (for us) accommodation in Ucluelet, a chalet on an island resort near the town. It was quite pretty and relaxing and we could have stayed for a long time. These photos show our chalet and the area around it, as well as some of the small townsite of Ucluelet. Most of the photos are from two walks on the Wild Pacific Trail with it's beautiful rocky vistas of the sea; one of these walks was shortly after we arrived in town, and the other was to watch the sunset on our last night in British Columbia.
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Pacific Rim National Park (76 photos) - We took an early morning walk on the Rainforest Train within this part that was intensely beautiful. The forest would be impassible were it not for the wooden walkways in the park. It was fascinating to see so many trees growing out of dead and fallen comrades, which is the way that most of them get started. A second walk was down the Schooner Trail to Long Beach and Schooner Cover, where we took no photos of the forest, but lots of beaches and the shoreline with the coast. On the way home, we also dropped into vast Combers Beach.
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Tofino (27 photos) - We spent an afternoon in Tofino, having lunch, walking around town a little, then following the Tonquin Trail to Tofino Beach. There are a few photos of the cemetery in town as well.
