weekend

Jeff had Friday off so we had a nice long weekend. On Friday we decided to take a drive along the Sea to Sky Highway which goes north from Vancouver along the coast. You can see lots of islands from the road, when the big trees aren't blocking your way. It's very pretty.

We stopped in a little town called Britannia Beach where there is an old copper mine, which was once the largest copper mine in the British Empire. It was closed in 1974 and is now the BC museum of mining. We spent the afternoon there, looking at the exhibits and taking a tour through the mine shaft that is basically a tunnel through the mountain. They demonstrated the different kinds of drills the miners used to get the ore out of the mine but I had to take Calum out of the tour early because he hated wearing his little hard hat.

Just a little north of there is the town of Squamish which we didn't have time to explore. We will have to go back as I understand there is a railroad museum that would be fun to explore.

On Saturday we just hung around at home and then Sunday decided to go for another drive. This time I took Jeff and the kids back to that wonderful used bookstore in Chilliwack which gave them their first experience of driving through the Fraser Valley. Again we didn't have time to do much so we'll have to go back another time.

So now we've taken day trips north and east of Vancouver; next we need to look into taking a ferry over to Vancouver island (west and south) and take a day to drive south into Washington where I understand that there is a beautiful scenic drive along the coast... not to mention Seattle which we would like to explore too. I hear it's about three hours away so we'd need to spend a weekend there, I think.

Anyone reading this would be very welcome to come out for a visit and join us on our exploration of the west coast!