50°01′N 125°14′W · Vancouver Island, British Columbia · Twenty-one days
The Island
Explorer & beyond
Everything below is within reach of the front door. The chart is numbered; the cards are numbered to match. Pick a number, check the tide, go.
Where you actually are
A long, mountainous island lying diagonally off the Pacific coast of Canada, with a spine of alpine peaks down the middle that splits it in two: a sheltered, farmed, sunny east side — where you're staying — and a wild, rain-drenched west coast facing four thousand miles of open ocean. Almost everyone lives on the east side. Nearly all of the middle is uninhabited.
Swipe the map sideways
Dashed magenta: ferry crossings · Brown: the one highway · Outlined: Strathcona Park
Stylised. Still not for navigation.
For everyone arriving from the UK
It is bigger and emptier than it looks on a map
- LatitudeYou are level with Plymouth, not Aberdeen. Same sun angle, same long summer evenings — it stays light until nearly nine in early August.
- ScaleThe island is half again the size of Wales and 460 km end to end — London to Newcastle. Driving "just up the island" is a real day out.
- TimeEight hours behind the UK. Lunch here is bedtime there, which is worth knowing before you ring home.
- DrivingOn the right. Distances and speeds in kilometres — the highway runs at 90 to 120 km/h, so roughly 55 to 75 mph. Fuel is sold by the litre. You may turn right on a red light after coming to a full stop, unless a sign forbids it.
- The real road hazardNot other drivers — deer and elk, at dawn and dusk, on every rural road including ours. If one crosses, brake and wait: there is almost always a second one behind it.
- Bears and cougarsThe genuine novelty. Both live here and neither wants to meet you. Make noise on trails, keep food indoors, never leave rubbish out, and give any animal a wide berth and an obvious escape route.
- Plugs and power120 volts, flat two-pin sockets. Phone and laptop chargers handle it fine; a UK hairdryer or travel kettle will not, even with an adapter.
- MoneySales tax is added at the till, not shown on the shelf — expect about 12% on top. Tip 15–20% in restaurants and bars; it isn't optional here the way it is at home.
- SignalMobile coverage vanishes in Strathcona, on the Tofino road and in patches along the coast. Download offline maps before you set out.
- Health coverCanadian healthcare is not free to visitors and a hospital visit is expensive. Check your travel insurance actually covers hiking and anything on the water before you need it.
The chart
Campbell River down to Parksville, with the far-flung days noted at the margins the way a real chart does it. Tap any numbered stop to jump to it.
Swipe the chart sideways to see Parksville
Stops 1–14, 18 and 19 plotted · A–D at the house · 15–17 off chart
Not for navigation. Obviously.
What kind of day is it?
Narrow the list to what suits the weather and the energy in the room.
Showing all 23
Two days already spoken for
Build the rest of the three weeks around these.
Saturday, August 1 — Comox plant sale, then Parksville
The day runs north to south: a plant sale in Comox first thing, then an hour down the coast to Parksville for the beach and everything that follows it.
- Morning — Wild Oasis bamboo sale, Comox A private garden opening up for a sale, not a nursery. Big architectural plants and clumping bamboo varieties that thrive up here, grown by someone who clearly knows what they're doing. The best landscaping ideas of the whole trip, and you can take some home. 1–1.5 hrs.
- Midday — south to Parksville About an hour. Take Oceanside 19A for the water views instead of the inland freeway if nobody's in a hurry.
- Afternoon — paddleboards & the Beach Festival Launch off the shallow, calm beach at Parksville Community Park, then walk down the sand to the sandcastle sculpting competition. The exhibition runs until 8:30 pm, so there's no rush.
- Evening — outdoor theatre Back to the community park for the live rock show on the open-air stage.
- Late — house party Cap it off with friends in town.
Two things that will make this day work The Comox stop is someone's home, so: bring cash, don't turn up before opening, and put a tarp and a couple of boxes in the trunk — pots tip over on the drive and wet soil is unforgiving. Give anything you buy a deep water as soon as you're back. Down in Parksville, the beach flats run out an enormous distance at low tide and the standing water warms right up, so aim the paddleboards at a rising tide and the beach walk at a falling one.
Saturday, August 8 — Race night at Saratoga Speedway
A quarter-mile oval in the trees, ten minutes up the road. Stock cars and bombers, concession fries, and the noise bouncing off the bleachers until the lights come on.
Come prepared Ear protection if you're bringing kids, cash for the concession, and a blanket each — it gets cold fast once the sun drops behind the mountains.
Without leaving the property
The best days here are often the ones where nobody starts the car. Join in or don't — there's no obligation attached to any of this.
Salmon, from the sailboat
We sail out and troll along the drop-off and the river mouths, where the bait sits. If the wind quits we drop the motor and keep fishing — the fish don't care how you got there. Rods, tackle and a net are aboard.
Before we keep anything You'll need a BC tidal waters sport fishing licence, plus a salmon conservation stamp to retain a salmon. Openings and limits change through the season, so we check the current DFO notices the night before. Bring a warm layer, a hat and sunglasses — it's ten degrees cooler out there than in the yard.
Splitting the winter woodpile
There's a pile of seasoned fir and alder rounds waiting on the block. Straight-grained fir opens up with one good swing; anything knotty gets the wedge and the sledge. Stack it bark-side up under the eaves.
House rules Closed-toe boots, gloves, and a clear arm's-length swing radius before you lift anything. Never hold a round steady with your hand — stand it on the block and let it fall where it wants.
Building the greenhouse
Framing, glazing, hanging the door, building the potting bench. It's the kind of job that goes twice as fast with a second pair of hands on the other end of a board. Tools, gloves and eye protection are in the shed.
Skill required None. If you can hold a tape measure and read a level you're already useful. Measure twice — that's the entire trade secret.
The garden beds
Weeding, watering, and picking whatever's ready — help yourself, that's what it's for. Half of dinner most nights comes out of these beds, and the more you pick the more it produces.
Water timing Early morning or after the sun's off the beds. Midday watering mostly evaporates and scorches the leaves it lands on.
Salt water
Mitlenatch Island Nature Provincial Park
The Galápagos of the Strait of Georgia — a dry, wildflowered rock in the rain shadow, ringed with harbour seal and Steller sea lion haul-outs and the biggest seabird colony in the northern strait.
How it works It's a weather day, not a calendar day. We watch the marine forecast and go on the first flat morning. Stay on the marked trail, keep your distance from the haul-outs, and the animals stay put and let you watch.
Discovery Passage Aquarium & the fishing pier
A small, hands-on aquarium stocked entirely with species caught in the passage out front — and returned to it at the end of the season. Then walk out along Canada's first saltwater fishing pier and look for the same animals in the wild.
Best for A grey afternoon, and anyone under ten. The touch tanks are the whole point.
Rivers, sand and elevation
Oyster River Nature Park & Saratoga Beach
Flat, shaded, easy trails through the estuary, opening out at the river mouth onto a beach that seems to keep going. The closest thing to a default good day on this list.
Time the tide At low tide the sand flats run out several hundred metres and the standing water on them is bath-warm by afternoon — much warmer than the strait ever gets.
Miracle Beach Provincial Park
The closest thing on this list to a back garden: a wide, safe, shallow beach with tide pools, a couple of kilometres of soft forest trail, and Black Creek itself running out to the sea through the middle of it.
Look for the notches All this forest was felled twice over, in the 1890s and again between the wars. The huge Douglas-fir stumps still standing among the second growth have rectangular slots cut into their sides — springboard notches, where two men wedged planks to stand on and sawed above the flare of the trunk. Once you've spotted one you'll see them everywhere.
The Quinsam River salmon run — and the bears
Campbell River calls itself the Salmon Capital of the World, and the Quinsam is where you go to see why. A federal hatchery with free entry, an indoor exhibit, and walking trails along the river where the fish stack up below the ladder. When the run is on, the black bears come down to fish it — along with the eagles, the gulls and the vultures.
- What runs, and when Pinks peak in September. Coho and chinook through October and November. Steelhead November to April. Juvenile fish in the pens year-round.
- If you're here in August You'll get the hatchery, the exhibit and the trails — but not the spectacle, and not bears on the river. The fish are still gathering out in the strait. Ring ahead on 250-287-9564 and they'll tell you exactly what's in the river that week.
- The August version instead From late July into September, dive shops in Campbell River kit you out with wetsuit, mask and fins for a self-guided float down the shallow Campbell River — about a mile, thirty or forty minutes, drifting directly over the salmon holding in the current. Ask in town who's running it this season.
- Don't get locked in The gate opens at 8 am and is locked at 3:30 pm sharp, with your car inside it if you're not paying attention. Arriving late, park outside and walk.
Getting there Highway 28 west out of Campbell River towards Gold River, then left onto Quinsam Road about 200 metres past the Highway 19 junction, and roughly 2 km to the entrance. Elk Falls is on the same road — pair them.
Puntledge River tubing
The local summer ritual. Drop in, lie back, and let the gentle stretches carry you down through the shade for a couple of hours.
Logistics Leave a car at the take-out before you start, or you'll be walking back in bare feet. Shoes you can swim in, and check the river level first — BC Hydro releases can change the flow quickly.
Elk Falls Provincial Park
A 60-metre suspension bridge strung across the canyon directly opposite the falls, on an easy loop from the parking lot. Maximum payoff per step of anything in this guide.
Go early The bridge is narrow and the parking lot fills by mid-morning in August. Before 9 am you may have it to yourself.
Strathcona Provincial Park
BC's oldest park, and the serious end of the list: alpine lakes, multi-kilometre ascents, and real elevation. If someone in the group wants to earn their dinner, this is where they go.
Non-negotiables Start early, carry more water than you think, and take a rain shell even on a blue morning — the weather up there writes its own rules. Make noise on the trail; this is bear and cougar country and they'd rather hear you coming.
Slow drives & rainy days
The Old Island Highway to Fanny Bay
Skip the inland freeway entirely and take Oceanside Route 19A instead. It's slower, it winds, and it hugs the water the whole way. Finish in Fanny Bay eating world-famous oysters about two hundred metres from where they were pulled.
Stop anywhere The point of this drive is the pullouts. Baynes Sound is sheltered and glassy, and the whole far side is Denman and Hornby Island.
Comox coastal tour: Point Holmes to the marina
Start at Point Holmes, run out along Goose Spit — a sand hook curling right into Comox Harbour with water on both sides of the road — and finish among the masts at the Comox marina.
Take the bikes It's flat, it's short, and at 15 km/h you'll actually see the glacier across the harbour instead of driving past it.
Cumberland Museum & Archives
A serious, unsentimental account of the valley's coal mining years and the labour history that came with them — including Ginger Goodwin, who is buried up the hill. Then walk the main street for the bakeries and coffee.
Also here Cumberland has one of the best mountain-bike networks on the island running straight out of the village, if anyone brought a bike.
Courtenay & District Museum
Home of the Elasmosaur — a twelve-metre marine reptile pulled out of the Puntledge River, a few minutes from where you'd go tubing. Pair the two on the same day and the river reads completely differently.
The rain plan This plus the Cumberland museum plus lunch is a full, satisfying day that never once requires a rain jacket.
Saturday mornings
Comox Valley Farmers' Market
The valley's proper market: produce, bread, cheese, makers, breakfast, live music. Go for breakfast and come home with dinner.
Go at nine Berries and anything baked are gone well before noon. This is the one thing on the list where an hour's lateness genuinely costs you.
Innisfree Farm & Botanic Garden
A quiet, carefully built botanic garden and farm. Wander the grounds, take notes if you're planning anything at home, then sit down with a herbal tea and something out of the oven.
Pair it Fifteen minutes from the farmers' market and open the same morning. Market first, garden after.
Worth the whole day
Three trips that leave this sheet entirely. Each one is a dawn start or an overnight bag.
Tofino & the wild coast
Straight across the island to the open Pacific. Stop at Live To Surf on the Pacific Rim Highway for a thick wetsuit and a board, then pick a beach — they run for kilometres and the swell arrives with nothing in its way since Japan.
About that drive Three hours on paper, more in practice: it's a winding mountain road with logging trucks and viewpoints you'll want to stop at. Leave at seven, check the surf report and the tide before committing to a beach.
Victoria & The Butchart Gardens
South to the provincial capital, and to twenty-two hectares of gardens built inside an exhausted limestone quarry — still the most ambitious piece of landscaping in the country.
Order of operations Gardens in the morning while it's cool and quiet, harbour and Inner Harbour causeway in the afternoon, dinner in town, home late. Or stay over and do it properly.
Vancouver
Stanley Park, the seawall, the downtown core, and food you can't get out here. After a week of gravel roads and tide tables, a city is a genuinely refreshing contrast.
Getting there BC Ferries if you want the car and the deck chairs; a float plane if you want the trip to be the best part of the day. Book the ferry ahead on a summer weekend.
A short history of this shoreline
Four things worth knowing about the ground under the house. Each one ends with something you can go and put your hands on.
Four thousand years and counting
The Comox Valley: the land of plenty
This whole coast is the unceded traditional territory of the K'ómoks First Nation, whose ancestors — the Sathloot, Sasitla, Ieeksun and Puntledge among them — held a territory running from Kelsey Bay in the north down to Hornby and Denman Islands. In their own language they called it the land of plenty, and archaeologists have found evidence of continuous settlement in Comox Harbour going back at least four thousand years. The word Comox itself descends from a Kwak'wala term meaning abundance.
Then 1862 brought a smallpox epidemic that killed an estimated third of First Nations people on Vancouver Island, and European settlers arrived in the same decade to farm the valley. The last fluent speaker of the Island Comox dialect died in 1995. The Nation is today working through the treaty process, and the K'ómoks name is back on the estuary, the museums and the road signs.
Go and see it — stop 12 At low tide along Dyke Road in Comox, hundreds of wooden stakes still stand up out of the mud. They are the remains of ancient fish weirs — funnel-shaped fences that trapped salmon on the falling tide — and some have been dated to well over a thousand years old. They are, quietly, one of the most remarkable archaeological sites in Canada, and there is no sign, no gate and no admission fee.
1900s to the 1960s
Black Creek: firs, then farms
You are staying in what was, in living memory, a German-speaking village. In the early 1900s Black Creek was logging camps — this ground grew some of the largest Douglas firs ever recorded anywhere in the world. Once they were gone, the land was opened in the 1930s to German-speaking Mennonite settlers, most arriving from the Soviet Union by way of Mexico or the Canadian prairies.
They cleared stumps and stones and built dairy and fruit farms out of ground that everyone else had written off. In the 1950s those same families sponsored a further wave of Austrian and German immigrants, and community business was still being conducted in a mixture of German and English well into the 1960s.
Go and see it — stops 13 and D Drive the Old Island Highway slowly and look at the farm gates: the small, immaculate market gardens and orchards lining that road are the direct descendants of those 1930s holdings. The vegetable beds behind the house are in exactly the same tradition, on exactly the same stony soil.
1886 · 1950
Miracle Beach and its name
The beach five minutes from the door has a name that comes from a We Wai Kai story, in which a young woman is turned to stone — becoming the island out in the strait — and the transformation is witnessed as a miracle from this shore. That island is Mitlenatch, and it is stop 4 in this guide: you can look at it from the beach and then go and stand on it.
The colonial history is shorter and blunter. The land was surveyed for timber in 1886 and logged almost immediately, then cut over a second time in the 1920s and 30s. A local man, Frank Pottage, bought it in 1948 intending to subdivide it for housing; in the end he sold 57 hectares to the province and gifted the land at the creek mouth, and the park was established in 1950. It has grown to 135 hectares since.
Go and see it — stops 18 and 4 Walk the forest loop and find the springboard notches in the old stumps. Then look out to the low island on the horizon — that's Mitlenatch. Come back in the autumn and Black Creek fills with spawning coho, right where it crosses the beach.
Designated March 1911
Strathcona: the first park in British Columbia
Nearly 2,500 square kilometres of mountain wilderness across the middle of the island — larger than the Lake District — and the oldest protected park in the province. There are two developed corners, Buttle Lake and Forbidden Plateau, and three tracts inside it with no roads at all.
For UK visitors it is oddly full of home. It is named for Donald Smith, 1st Baron Strathcona and Mount Royal, a Scot from Moray who drove the last spike of the Canadian Pacific Railway and later served as Canada's High Commissioner in London. Buttle Lake carries the name of a naval officer who explored it in the 1860s; Mount Albert Edward is named for the man who became Edward VII; the island's highest point, the Golden Hinde at 2,198 metres, shares its name with Drake's ship. And the old-growth still standing in those valleys was already ancient forest in 1778, when Captain Cook of the Royal Navy came ashore at Nootka Sound on the far side of the same mountains.
Go and see it — stop 1 Buttle Lake is about an hour from the house and the walk in to Lower Myra Falls is short. Della Falls, the highest waterfall in Canada at 440 metres over three cascades, is also in this park — but it takes a boat across Great Central Lake and a 16 km hike each way, so it's a three-day proposition, not an afternoon.
Sheet 5
Things worth knowing
Check the tide
Half this guide changes character with the tide — the beaches, the paddleboards, the fishing, the sand flats. It's the first thing locals look at and the last thing visitors think of.
Check the marine forecast
Before anything that floats. The strait can be flat at eight and unpleasant by eleven, and the wind usually builds with the afternoon.
By the door
Rain shell, boots, a warm layer even in August, water bottle, and the binoculars. Sunscreen — the overcast days burn people worse than the bright ones.
On the trails
Bears and cougars live here. Make noise, keep dogs close, don't leave food or garbage outside, and give any animal you see a very wide berth and an exit.
Wifi
Network Password
Reach us
and the nearest hospital is Campbell River, on Second Avenue.