Day 9

We woke up REALLY early today to get the 6:15am bus for the West Coast Trail. Our original plan was to start the trail on Sunday, but since Michael and I got into Victoria on Saturday afternoon, there was not enough time to get everything ready for Sunday. Unfortunately the bus only leaves every second day, which is why we didn't leave yesterday (and instead got a double tour of Victoria). But Renita was amazing (thank you so much for everything Renita)! She woke up early just to drive us to the bus (then I'm assuming she went home and went back to bed for a bit). There was only one other person waiting at the bus stop. His name was Sean and he just graduated from U of T engineering. He spent the past six days hitch hiking across Canada to do the trail.

The bus was long and windy. All of us slept for most of the ride up to Bamfield. Roughly six hours later, we were at the Start of the West Coast Trail. We signed up and $168 later, we were allowed to do the trail! We had to wait until the info session at 1pm, explaining things about the trail before we were allowed to begin. They went over a general overview of the trail, talked about safety (ie bear/cougar/wolf info, info on tricky parts of the trail, etc). Then we headed off. Sean was a bit ahead of us, and at the 3km mark we caught up to him and the four of us continued to our campsite. It was a gorgeous day for hiking. The sky was blue, the sun was out, and the scenery was spectacular! The forest was so dense and interesting at times, and there were some amazing beach views! We also saw some sea lions, and climbed down for a closer look (not too close obviously!). Just before the campground, we stopped off at the first lighthouse on the west coast. The lighthouse operator came out to talk to us for a bit. She thought I was someone she knew in school, and then told us about her job, and showed us the glass balls that washed ashore from Japan. It was really cool.

We decided to camp out at the 14km mark. It was a nice campground on the beach. It was just the three of us and Sean who camped out there (everyone else decided to camp out at 12km). We set up camp, started making dinner, then started making a MASSIVE bonfire. It started out tame enough. We passed around the skittle vodka for a bit and had nice deep conversations about life (etc). Then we decided to make the bonfire MASSIVE (and by we, I mostly mean Michaeland Travis). There was so much driftwood to use that it wasn't hard to make the flame as tall as Travis. Then we packed up and put our food/toiletries in the bear lockers and went to bed.