Friday, July 24th
This morning we drove down Highway 1 from Parksville to Nanaimo, where we explored the old log Bastion, built in the 1850’s by the Hudson Bay Company to protect its coal mining operations here. I marveled at an old map of the mines that showed literally hundreds of tunnels beneath the waters of the harbor. We wandered through the terraces and craft stalls overlooking the marina and harbor before heading south again.
The town of Chemainus, pronounced Chuh-MAIN-us, used to be a prosperous lumbering town before the sawmill shut down. In 1982 the town began to invite artists to paint murals depicting different aspects of the town’s history on buildings around the town. Today there are 39, with several more planned.
We ate lunch in the city park while listening to a Bolivian musician playing flutes and panpipes, and then took a walking tour. We covered the remaining 78 km to Victoria in the afternoon, checked into a motel near the city center, and were hosted for dinner at Gale and Sabra’s house.
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