Vancouver Island

Last Monday was Thanksgiving Day in Canada. I can't really say much about Thanksgiving as I neither had a turkey dinner nor any other Thanksgiving activity. However, I had a long weekend.
We decided to spend our precious three free days in Tofino, a surfer's paradise on Vancouver Island. There's basically two things you can do on Vancouver Island. Visiting Victoria (the capital of BC) or doing holiday at the beach. As the weather is still nice, we decided to go for the beach and, to get the whole experience, camp there.
We left Kamloops on Friday afternoon, after buying a lot of supplies and trying to fit everything in a car (we made it!).

 We headed towards Vancouver where we had dinner and then went to Tsawassen south of Vancouver to get the ferry over to the Island. We arrived in Nanaimo at 1 AM and then drove for another three hours to get to Tofino. We parked our car on the first parking lot we found, unpacked our sleepingbags and went to bed. In the car.
Next morning we found out that we chose a very nice place to leave our car. After walking a short way through the forest, we stood on the beautiful Chesterman Beach. We took a morning walk, then went to wake up the others and cooked breakfast on a campfire.

 Then we did what everyone does in Tofino. We went surfing. We rented the boards, wetsuits, shoes and gloves at a local surf shop, Dennis showed us what do do and off we went into the cold Pacific. In the first 10 minutes I drank an estimated 20 litres of water. But after some time, when you manage to actually stay on the board it is really nice. (Even tough I have to say that surfing will never become my favourite sport.)
After three hours of surfing we were pretty exhausted and it was time to get ready for dinner. We made another campfire and cooked some stew (= vegetables, onions, potatoes, sand, and whatever else we found mixed together and cooked on fire), watched the sunset and had dinner on the beach. Afterwards we sat together, drank some rum and grilled some marshmallows.

We decided to keep the tent in its bag and sleep under the stars. To be entirely honest, it wasn't even cold. With my sleeping bag, sweater, warm socks, hat and gloves I slept pretty well, considering that it was on a beach in october!

In the morning I was woken up by some crows exploring our campsite. It was kind of weird to wake up while people next to you are taking walks on the beach. After a breakfast on the beach and washing our hair in teamwork with some bottled water we started our Sunday program. Some of us decided to go surfing again while Ester, Mariona and me took the car and went to Long Beach, one of the many beaches around Tofino. We were walking on the beach along the sea for hours and it was really beautiful.

In the evening after dinner it was time to leave paradise again. As we took the early ferry we had to get back to Nanaimo. We slept a few (!!) hours in the parking lot and then boarded the ferry at 6 AM. We saw a wonderful sunrise as we were heading towards Vancouver.

After a nice breakfast at the Cambie (the place I stayed in my first days here in Canada) we drove back to Kamloops where I was really glad to get into the shower and put on some clean clothes.