Let's Go Places: British Columbia

Friends, I just got back from a 12 day trip to British Columbia.  We have some catching up to do!  Today I'm going to give you an overview of the trip and then I'm going to take you along for day one.  We'll fly in, spend the night in Vancouver, and then we're going to drive to Kelowna.

How This Trip Came to Be

My #1 reason for going to BC was to meet one of my favorite people on the internets.  When I reached out to Nicole to talk about a visit, the date picked itself: her family was going to be away in early August.

My non-Nicole reasons for wanting to go to BC are that I want to spend at least one night in every state and province, visit every state/provincial capital, and that my family went to Vancouver when I was small, and I had vague but fond memories.  Specifically that we stayed at a very old hotel and that I found a lot of coins on the ground, so it was the Best Childhood Trip Ever.

BC is far from home, so I didn't want to just pop in to say hi to Nicole and pick up any loose change that I might find on the streets.  I'm experimenting with finding the right balance of lots of time in a new place without being away from home for too long, and right now I think that time is a bit less than two weeks.  I flew into Vancouver on Thursday, July 31, and left on Tuesday, August 12.

My agenda was to meet Nicole, spend time in Vancouver, and to go to the provincial capital of Victoria.  I picked Nicole's brain for ideas of other places to go, and then sat myself down and figured out where I would lay my head each night.  That got me to this agenda:

Thursday: fly to Vancouver and spend the night.

Friday: pick up a rental car and drive to Kelowna four hours away, find something to do on the way.

Friday night to Monday morning: hang out with Nicole.

Monday: drive back to Vancouver, find something to do on the way.

Monday to Thursday: hang out in Vancouver.

Thursday: take the ferry to Vancouver Island and spend the night in Victoria.

Friday: head for the beach on the east side of the island, visit Parksville and stay in Nanaimo.

Sunday: head for the west side of the island, visit Tofino and stay in Ucluelet.

Monday: take the ferry back to Vancouver, return the rental car, and spend the night in a hotel with shuttle service to the airport.

Tuesday: come home!

I had an idea of things that I wanted to do in each place, but I didn't plan my days much beyond that.

You Just Used a Bunch of Words.  Where are These Places?

Yep, I know what you mean.  I am embarrassed to tell you how little I knew about the area going in.

Here is the bird's eye view:

And here is a closer view of the Vancouver/Vancouver Island situation.  I had a very hard time learning to spell and pronounce Nanaimo and Ucluelet.

The thing to know here is that Vancouver is the name of two places in BC.  It's the largest city, which is what I was thinking of, and it is also the name of a large island where the capital city of Victoria is located.  Vancouver Island is only accessible by boat or plane, but since a lot of people need to move between the island and mainland, there is a large ferry system and planes to make it happen.

Cha-Ching

How do you know when someone pulls off a credit card hack and gets their airfare for free?  Don't worry, they'll tell you.  The flight to BC would have been $1,000 if I had paid out of pocket.  I did exactly what I did for the California trip and transferred Chase points to United, which meant that I only had to pay $60 in taxes and fees for my seat on the plane.

I feel very smug about the free airfare, but I want to be very clear that getting one component of a trip for free is not the same thing as getting a free trip.  Because of the distance that I was covering, I needed to rent a car, and the cost of lodging in an epic place during the summer was very high.  This is the most expensive solo trip that I have ever taken, but as we will soon find out, it was money well spent.

Getting There

I flew out of my nearest Big City Airport at Early O'Clock.  There was a stopover at LAX, and the plane landed in Vancouver in the afternoon.  I did carry on only with a small suitcase and backpack, and the flights were on time and uneventful.

As per usual, it was mostly cloudy at home:

Then there were a lot of mountains, which I do not hate.

And then we came into Vancouver.

My normal method of going to Canada is by car, and getting in can be a little rough.  When I went to Pelee Island back in 2023, the border agent cross examined me over every little detail of the trip, made me show him my reservations for each night, and generally made me feel like a terrible person.

Clearing customs at the airport was a different experience.  I only had to scan my passport at a kiosk, click a button that the purpose of my trip was personal travel, and type in the number of days that I was going to be there.  Whew!

As soon as I cleared the airport, my next move was downtown Vancouver. I flexed my prowess at taking public transit by hopping on Skytrain like a boss.

[I have no prowess at taking public transit.  Skytrain is so easy to use that everyone hops on like a boss.  All that you have to do is to tap a credit card when you go in and when you leave.]

I hopped off the train in downtown and made the short walk to my hotel.  For the most part I'm Team Airbnb, but the purpose of this stay was to crash for a night after a long trip across several time zones.  I had recently seen a Youtube video about a Vancouver trip that featured a night in a budget hotel that looked fun, so I did not overthink it.

If you would like to watch a 38 minute video about someone else's solo trip to Vancouver, you can find that here, and here is a short clip of the hotel:

The Victorian Hotel:

They didn't have any of the cheapo rooms with shared bathrooms shown in the video, but the price was reasonable (for Vancouver anyway) and my room had a private bathroom.  Other than that, it was very similar to what you saw on Youtube.  I liked it as well as I like any hotel and I would stay there again if I just needed a one night stay.

I did a quick check in with Google to see what the food options were, and walked to Pokerrito for something that I had heard about but had never had before: a sushi burrito.  It was excellent, as was pretty much every other bite of food that I ate on this trip.

After dinner I walked around for a little bit.  I wasn't looking to do anything in Vancouver that night since I was coming back after the weekend, but as I walked around I saw a sign for a lookout tower that promised epic views of the city.  Here is the view of the tower as I was walking to dinner:

This is the elevator going up.  

And here is the view from the top.

It was now 7:00 PM pacific time, or 10:00 PM in my home time zone on a day that had started at 4:00 AM.  I had nothing to prove by staying up, so I hit the sack.

The next morning I was up at 4:00 AM, or a very late 7:00 AM by home standards.  I brewed up a teeny tiny coffee in the room's Nespresso machine, and chased it down with the rest of the teeny tiny coffee pods to net approximately one small cup of coffee.  Breakfast was a Cliff bar and string cheese from my stash of road snacks.

I did a little bit of work including a meeting at 6:30 AM, and then it was time to pick up my rental car.  I could have hauled my luggage back to Skytrain and walked (cheap but difficult), I could have taken Skytrain without my luggage and then come back to the hotel by car (cheap but time consuming), and the "not that much more expensive" and easy option was to get a Lyft.  I pressed the easy button, and very soon I had my very own set of wheels.  I had never driven a Prius before, and since I like small cars and don't enjoy spending time at gas stations, I was very happy to get this car.

Nicole lives about four hours away from Vancouver, which is not a terribly long drive by my road trip standards, but long enough I wanted to do something on the way.  My eyes spied a place called Bridal Veil Falls that was at a good halfway point.

I don't have the pictures to show for it since I was, well, you know, driving, but the view from the city was of mountains and I soon found myself in a world of gorgeousness.

I stopped at Bridal Veil Falls as planned to stretch my legs.  There was a well maintained trail that started flat and then had a decent bit of incline to it.

And then the waterfall and a "do not proceed past this point" sign.

Normally I am a rule follower and the waterfall was gorgeous from the sanctioned view point.  However, everyone else was proceeding past the sign so I did what everyone else was doing and got up close and personal with the waterfall.

I spent a bit more time walking around and taking in the views, and then I returned to the car, fired up GPS, and headed back to the mountains for my ultimate destination of Boyhouse HQ.  But that's a story for another day.

Who's been to any of these places?  Have you ever had a sushi burrito?