A trip to Port Renfrew (part I)

So it's been a long while since we've posted, so we've got some catching up to do. Back at the beginning of August Chris and Karen came to visit us for a few days. In order to get a real "West coast experience" we decided to go camping over the long weekend, somewhere near the ocean. Since Jeremi and I hadn't yet made it very far along the southern coast of the island, we decided to head towards Port Renfrew, to see what we would find.

Port Renfrew is at one end of both the West Coast Trail and the smaller Juan de Fuca Trail, and only really shows up on maps because there's nothing else around. If you start driving west from Victoria, it's where the road ends. I knew that it was small, but also knew that it increased in size a fair bit during the summer tourist season. We didn't know exactly where we were going to camp, but decided to just get there and see if we could find a spot at a campsite (most don't take reservations), or ask at the tourist bureau.

So we drove and drove, passing other places where we might have camped, until we made it to a tourism office with a mural that said Port Renfrew on it. There wasn't really much other indication that we were in a town. At this point it was around noon on the Friday of the August long weekend, at the very apex of the tourist season, and the tourism office was closed. Not just out for lunch, completely closed. Luckily there were a couple kids hanging around out front who were able to help us. I asked them if we were in Port Renfrew, to which they replied: "Yes. You're in Port Renfrew right now." Something tells me that we weren't the first visitors who weren't quite sure if that's all there was. They also helpfully directed us down a road where we'd be able to find some campsites.

We drove down this road a few kilometers, not quite sure where it would take us, until we came to a T-junction with the following sign:


We turned right, and eventually found a nice site on Fairy Lake. (Not at all like the one in Newmarket.) It was probably good that we weren't on the ocean too, as it was cold enough where we were.

Much fun was had at the campsite, with a good deal of beer to help it along. A couple of highlights are featured here: the contest to see how well we could drink beers using only BBQ utensils, and a complicated baseball-like game involving hitting small green berries with beer bottles.







The second picture doesn't actually illustrate the game itself very well, but you do get to see how entertaining Chris found it.