Day 21: Beautiful day!

Run

We started the day with a run in the Rathtrevor Park, at the beach we saw how low the sea level is during low tide. The water is really shallow so during low tide a lot of the oceans becomes land.

Hike

The weather was already great in the morning, blue sky and the sun out, it wasn’t too hot, so the perfect weather to hike.

We decided to start directly from the campground and see how far we make it. So first was around 2 km of road walking to get out of the park, across the highway and then another road to the beginning of a network of trails.

I found a trail on Alltrails which we roughly followed and which should lead up a mini “mountain” in the end.

The trail got narrower and narrower and we soon hiked on a single trail next to the Englishman River.

We had to cross the river and for that there was a pedestrian suspension bridge. For whatever reason I didn’t took a picture… :)

Then we followed the trail on the other side of the river. After a while the Alltrails route left the trail and used an older maintenance road. We did that as well, as this saved some distance, but wasn’t as nice as the trail before.

After a longer stretch on the maintenance road, we nearly missed the trail which started again on the left side. This was already the part where we started climbing up the “mountain”. The Mountain was around 250 m of elevation, so hill would be more precise. But it’s named “Little Mountain” and there is a lookout on top of it.

But before we reached that and were able to enjoy the looks, we had to find a way up. There was a sign which mentioned a trail and we decided to follow that. Too late we realized that this was another trail, but as it was pretty steep and slippery, we decided to continue on and not turn around. Initialy we had the hope that it maybe leads us to the top of “Little Mountain” as well, but in the end we hiked around the it and then took the road up to the top.

The views made up for the extra distance we covered.

Then we had to decide how we go back to the Rathtrevor Beach Park, roughly we had two options:
a) Go back the same way we came
b) Go back through the city with road walking

Even though option a) would have been a bit more scenic, we both preferred to hike something different instead of the same path again. So the road it was, first down “Little Mountain” and then direction Parksville.

Overall it wasn’t too bad, only some short stretches next to the highway were a bit unpleasant.

Shortly before the park entrance we spotted a small market with home made ice cream in the morning. So our goal was clear! After close to 20 km total, we reached the ice cream place and had a nice cool down in the hot afternoon sun.

Then we hiked the last km back to the campground and relaxed a bit, before we walked a bit through the ocean.

After that we had a shower, it was impressive, this has to be the shower with the lowest water pressure on the whole earth! The water mostly just flows down the wall and you had to press yourself against the wall to get wet… :)

We did another dinner at the campground. Pad Thai for me and Tim Hortons lentils for Nicole.

Edit: Just realized that this was already week 3… crazy how time is running. But still, 9 weeks left!!

Pictures

Activities

Run: Good morning rathtrevor beach
Hike: Little Mountain Lookout