Lazy Day on Vancouver Island

Tuesday March 29th was a pretty lazy and laid back day for us on Vancouver Island.  We got up and had breakfast at the Beach House in Courtenay before eventually hitting the road.  On this day we headed back to the University reserach centre at Deep Bay that had been closed on Easter Sunday.  Here they had a mounted skeleton of a humpback whale.  My company down in East Coulee had mounted Humpback and Sperm Whale skeletons in the past and I think we did a better job if I do say so myself.  I don't like the way that these guys used some sort of modelling matrix material between the bones of the flippers and between the vertebra.  This limited visibility of the skeleton, which in my mind is the purpose of such a display.  There were also some tanks here at the research centre that allowed kids to touch and feel all sorts of marine life.  It seemed to be very loosely organized and somewhat over priced.  There were no tour guides available to explain anything and the limited information provided for in a self guided tour was inadequate.  They didn't have proper signage or interpretive displays to explain anything.  We left feeling somewhat disappointed and ripped off.  

We also stopped at a couple of shops along the way.  One was an antique shop of sorts that had all sorts of old junk for sale.  Like many of these sorts of places it was somewhat overpriced for what was to a large degree... garbage [though it seems the owners prefer to pronounce it "vintage"].

On our way back up to the beach house in the afternoon we stopped at nearby Royston for a walk on the beach.  There was an old log dump here, that had been "salvaged" with the creation of an artificial jetty.  A rock point was built, and the wrecks of some old ships were dumped here.  Not quite sure what the purpose of this was... perhaps to create a sheltered environment for marine life...?  Or maybe just to prevent boats from running aground on the old logs...?  In any event, access to the site was limited and we were only able to view it from some distance away.

After this stop we headed into Comox, just across the bay from Courtenay.  We had been told that there was fresh salmon available to purchase down at the marina.  We wandered around for a while and eventually found the fish merchant, but on this day his boat was closed and there was no opportunity to buy anything for the girls.

Shortly after our brief stop here we headed back to the beach house.  Margarit and the two younger girls just wanted to relax and stay at the house.  Hailey and I went out for an afternoon drive up to Cumberland.  This was a old coal mining town a short distance inland.  A lot of Asian immigrants came here, or were perhaps forced here to work the mines.  Nothing is left operating any longer and the old Chinatown that was once here is pretty much gone.  But there was an old cemetery at the edge of town that had both a Chinese and Japanese section.  The Japanese part was fairly interesting with all the headstones clustered together into a monument like memorial.  We made a few photographs here before eventually heading back down to the beach house for supper.