This weekend past, we took Kayla to stay with a friend she had in Halifax who now lives in Metchosin.  This involved getting everyone up and going early Saturday morning to head to Tsawwassen to catch the 8 am ferry.  Early was leaving the house at 6:30 am.

It was a nice trip across to the Island, lots of sunshine, calm waters, and not too chilly.

After a stop in Sidney to grab some breakfast from Smitty’s, we headed to Metchosin.  Metchosin is south-west of Victoria.  Getting to Kayla’s friend’s house was interesting … we had the wrong street address and the GPS took us to a place that didn’t make a lot of sense.  With a little bit of a description from Kayla and the belief that we couldn’t be that far out, we eventually found the base (CFAD Rocky Point) and appropriate PMQ where her friend is living. Good thing because it turned out that none of the 3 cell phones we had with us were getting signals that far out.

We dropped Kayla off and headed over to visit with my cousins Mike and Gert and their kids.  It’s been quite some time since I’ve seen Mike’s kids, and wow, they’ve grown.  We visited a short while and then the 3 of us headed out with Mike to do some geocaching on the grounds of Royal Roads University.  Mike has one of those high-sensitivity GPSr’s (a Garmin Rhino) and was getting much better reception than we were.  Even still, he was smoking hot, nabbing all the 5 or 6 caches we got that afternoon (well, actually Gert got one too).  Gert came and met us half way there.  Aidan, unsurprisingly, took quite a shine to Gert.

We headed back and had supper with Mike and Gert and their daughter Marie.  After a great supper, we drove up the Malahat to Nanaimo to stay the night before heading up to Campbell River the next day.

It was the first time we’ve stayed with Aidan in a hotel room.  It was rough.  He just wouldn’t go to sleep, insisting on talking to us and singing.  When the fireworks started going off (no, seriously, fireworks) at 10 pm, fortunately he was asleep.

We found out that night that our Sunday plans had changed and instead of going up to Campbell River, we were going to meet my Aunt Jean in Nanaimo.  That meant we had some time to kill that morning, so we decided to do some geocaching.  Well, none of us slept particularly well, so you can imagine the moods we were all in.  Cranky 3 yr old, cranky 34 yr old and cranky and pregnant 30-something.  Adding to the geocaching difficulty were the Nanaimo bath tub races.  Muggles everywhere!

We only managed to grab two caches, one  of them down near the berth of one of the new “Super-C” class ferries.

After a bit of communication SNAFU, we found Aunt Jean on the edge of Nanaimo.  Yes, found.  The GPS came in pretty handy.

After lunch with Aunt Jean (note: Aidan has been saying “See you later, Sunshine” since then) it was a leisurely meander back down towards Victoria.  We stopped in Cowichan Bay and grabbed some artisan cheese (from Hillary’s) and bread from the wonderful “slow food” stroll along the shoreline there.  After Cowichan Bay, we headed into the Cowichan Valley and stopped by the Merridale Cidery and I picked up some hard apple cider.  I had been to both places while participating in the Grape Escape 3 years ago.

After that, it was pretty routine.  We headed back to Metchosin (and took some pictures along the way) picked up Kayla (Aidan really missed her) and headed back up the highway to the ferry.

Good thing we had reservations … we would have had a one or two sailing wait otherwise.  We were a little bit late leaving and didn’t pull into Tsawwassen until 10 pm.

Whew, what a long weekend.  Then the hike yesterday.  Now, it’s 9 pm and I’m ready for bed.