Echinoderms and Hippie Ghosts: Gabriola Island, BC

Before departing from the land of hockey and poutine, we took a day trip to Gabriola, a small and stunningly beautiful island that sits between Vancouver Island and the mainland.

Gabriola is known for its natural beauty and for being a wellspring of creative culture, due in large part to an influx of draft dodgers during the 60’s and 70’s. The island even features a small museum with an entire exhibit devoted to the history of hippie communes on Gabriola. (Ironically, these counterculture transplants were probably seeking the freedom to live a meaningful and nature-based life not unlike that of the native Snunéymux, who were all but eradicated from Gabriola by European diseases in the 1500’s.)

We spent most of our time on a gorgeous cerulean beach fringed with ghostly mountains in the distance, clambering from one tidepool to the next to spy on all manner of crusty and crawly things.

Each square foot of this beach held its own miniature universe, crowded with crabs, anemones, barnacles, abandoned shells, seaweed, and, yes, the occasional brilliant starfish. It was easy to spend several minutes hunched over a particular tidepool in silent reverie, witnessing its zoological microdramas — but when you finally came back to yourself and looked around you, the scenery struck you speechless all over again.

As if the breathtaking beaches aren’t enough, Gabriola, like Vancouver Island, is also home to a particularly lovely tree called the arbutus — or, by doting locals, “arbeauties.” Their dusty red trunks have a sort of wistful slant, like someone twisting to look out a window as they lose themselves to a daydream.

My favorite tree, however — which my aunt Holly pointed out to us several times, with a characteristic reverence for noteworthy strangeness — is the Monkey Puzzle Tree. It’s called this presumably because even a monkey couldn’t figure out how to climb its jagged, cactus-like branches.

Holly insisted on taking a picture of me, Sean, and my brother Van in front of this tree. I think she captured the towering weirdness that is the Monkey Puzzle Tree, and also maybe just a bit of that profound silliness that sometimes happens when you hang around people who have known you since you were in diapers.

Speaking of people who know me all too well, our next major destination is Madison, Wisconsin, where we’ll be staying with some good friends of mine for a month or so while we replenish our trip budget. Do I even remember how to eat cheese curds? Does Sean understand what a high of 40 degrees in October actually means? We’ll find out.

At the Fairy Castle: Vancouver Island, BC

As is fitting of a dreamy wonderland, we arrived in Vancouver Island via a dreamy boat ride across a misty sea. There we reached our long-sought destination, my aunt Holly’s cozy home in the countryside where we’d spend a week visiting with her, her partner Kirk, and my brother Van, who’d flown up from California.

Much as Americans love to poke fun at Canada (haha, Canadians, you’re so… nice?), we also seem to have a tendency to idealize it as some sort of pastoral socialist paradise where maple syrup flows like water and everyone opens the door for each other.

While the syrup is kind of pricey and I’m sure there’s a Canadian somewhere who forgot to write a thank-you note to his Uber driver one time, I have to say I haven’t encountered much evidence that Canada isn’t a pastoral socialist paradise. At any rate, they’ve sure got pastoral down pat.

We spent a lovely week exploring neighboring islands, checking out local native art galleries and museums, and testing out every swimming hole we could find. (As well as stuffing our faces with poutine — that is, when Kirk wasn’t dishing up gourmet feasts at home, which he did nearly every night. It never hurts to have a professional chef in the family.)

I can’t decide if this food belongs on a magazine cover or in my belly. OK, yes I can.

After two months on the road, it felt like heaven to settle down for a week in such a beautiful and welcoming spot. While we’ve seen a lot of amazing things this summer, one of the most rewarding parts of this experience has been having the luxury to take our time visiting the people we care about.

Fueled up with love and blueberry cobbler, we’re ready to hit the road again.

Veiled Paradise: The Olympic Northwest

Boy howdy, guys. Boy actual howdy. I’ve been to the Northwest once before, on another sprawling roadtrip some years ago. That time, I visited in the dead of winter and still fell madly in love, so visiting in the summer was a bit like falling in love with Leonardo DiCaprio in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and then going to see Titanic. (For all of you out there under 30 — I tried to come up with a more timely analogy, but it led me down a dark Internet hole of what young people are into these days, so you’re on your own.)

What I’m trying to say is that it’s goddang beautiful up here. We drove through towering pine forests lush with green undergrowth, misty fields where fire-ravaged trunks pricked up from the grass like gravestones. The seasides were cradled by strands of black rocks, waves crashing against them in foaming white gales.

The Northwest has a reputation for being terminally overcast for much of the year, and I’m sure this is true — although I suspect the locals may exaggerate to protect their already overcrowded wonderland — but the worst we encountered was a dreamy mist that usually cleared by afternoon. (Which was fortunate, because we were usually too lazy to set up a rain fly.)

We explored Astoria, where the Goonies was filmed, and meandered along the Northern coast of Washington, biding time until we caught the ferry to visit my aunt in Vancouver Island. We spent an afternoon in Port Townsend, a charming, cozy little peninsula town where we got to watch a beautiful wooden boat being constructed in a nautical workshop. We explored Port Angeles, where we wandered a long, narrow moraine that stretched into the sea like a crooked finger, the fog so thick it seemed to mirror the still grey of the water.

Finally, we set up camp for a few nights in the Olympic National Forest, which we easily agreed was one of the most beautiful places we’d camped so far. The trees were so thick it was impossible to tell whether the white orb blazing through the trunks at night was a full moon.

We would have gladly camped there for days, or just given up our human cards permanently and been forest elves, but the next adventure beckoned. We were about to complete our trajectory up the Western coast to my aunt’s home in Vancouver Island, which had begun to take the shape of a mythical castle at the end of hero’s quest as we persevered through the ups and downs of life on the road.

So at long last, we hopped on the ferry at Port Angeles and made our merry way towards the sea.

Onward to the land of politeness and poutine!