Vancouver Island Trip - Day 3

It was raining pretty steadily when we got up on Sunday morning... October 20th.  We were a little slow and lazy in having breakfast and getting our stuff together.  Eventually we put on our rain gear and ventured out into the wet.  We took a drive down island on the old highway, and checked out the sights along the way.  Lots of small towns down there and we thought about some places that we might return to for some shooting.  We decided to venture inland into the trees and see if we could shelter ourselves a little from the steadily falling rain.  We ended up on the highway towards Port Alberni and stopped at MacMillan Provincial Park.  Cathedral Grove in the park is an old growth forest of Western Red Cedar and Douglas Fir trees.  There is the usual west coast understory of ferns, mosses, maples and other small shrubs.

Rob had an umbrella but I wasn't smart enough to bring one along so I just got wet.  At one point Brad tried to help me out and held the umbrella while I was setting up.  It quickly became evident that we were just going to get really wet and that was all that was to it.  I had a rain jacket, hat and rubber boots but my backpack and all my camera gear was soaked.  My note pad got so saturated that the ink from the pen I had used to label the holder numbers and type of film washed completely away.  Even a pencil would barely write on the soggy, wet paper.  We hung out there in the woods for two or three hours and photographed until mid afternoon when the light began to fade.  I seem to recall that I set up the view camera four or five times and shot about a dozen sheets of film.  Once we packed up and left it was a drive of about an hour to get back to the rented house in Courtenay.  There we spread out all our camera gear to dry and it sort of looked like a used camera store.
We ended up cooking almost all of our evening meals at the house and only went out to a restaurant once during the entire trip.  The evening routine for the week consisted of my checking e-mails to see if there were any work issues to be addressed.  Then we made our evening meal and tidied up the dishes.  After supper we would visit and have a few beers. Both Brad and I brought our guitars along on this trip and almost every evening we sat up and played.  Brad has been playing for several years now and is a lot further along then I am.  Mostly because he seems to be able to dedicate a lot more time to practice.  With work and everything else going on in my life it seems I have very little time for music.