This day was possibly one of the most uneventful days of the trip, however before I write about something I’ve foreshadowed to be boring, I will say there was material to mention. The drive from Tofino to Nanaimo started very early, per usual. This day was strictly a driving day, with the hopes to see parts of Vancouver. We had pre-booked a hotel since we were going to be near the city, and it was located about 15 miles west of the city center.
The drive to get to this portion is about 3 hours if you do not include the ferry crossing. This was an exciting day only due to the fact that we will be arriving in the mainland of Canada for the first time ever, and through a different ferry than the one we came over on. Before we arrived in Nanaimo, we stopped in the town of Port Alberni to grab coffee again after our prior day addiction of Tim Hortons. This was the same spot that we visited the day before. This was our miniature breakfast, coffee and donuts. After we left we started the second half of the stretch which took us another 30 minutes to reach the port. We arrived after about 2 hours of driving around 9:30. We made it in perfect time to get breakfast at the ferry port cafe area, and relax before they loaded cars in an organized fashion.
This ferry left Nanaimo every hour, and was almost $90 to transport the car. This ferry was much bigger however, and accommodated almost double the amount of cars as the previous boat. This ferry ride was also much longer than the previous one to Victoria form North mainland of the US. This allowed us to have lunch on the ferry, and watch a documentary we were viewing the night before. I believe it was ‘Coming Clean’ which is about Scientology.
By the time we boarded land we were ready to hit the road again and I had my directions to the hotel ready to go. It took us about 30 minutes to drive to the location, and once we checked in we were tired, and did not feel like going into the city center, thus we headed to a local sushi place for dinner while we took time to do a solid batch of laundry. This was the first time we had cleaned our clothes in almost two weeks so this was a nice surprise to be able to do this!
We decided that for the rest of the night we would relax and watch tv so we could be rested for a long day ahead following. We ended up in bed around 9pm and fell asleep getting ready for a big day to follow!
Expenses
5.34 coffee
89.70 ferry fee
22.33 dinner
92.03 hotel
20.22 lunch ferry
29.44 gas
6 cleaners
Total – 265.06