HU Canada and Vancouver Island

It was not the first time we went to a Horizons Unlimited meeting, but it was the first time we would be at the Canadian one. Just before we got there, we learned that it is the second biggest meeting they have and they were expecting about 340 people.

We saw some people we had met along the way, we saw Petra and Anders, who left with us last year at the UK meeting and we met lots of new interesting people. This is one of the things we love about the meetings of Horizons, the connection you have with people attending them, travel. Every time we go to a meeting, we do a presentation of our latest trip and this time we did one about our Mongolian one. Although we were super tired when it was our turn to do our presentation (it was the last of the event on Saturday evening) we still heard a lot of people laughing in the right places and afterwards some people told us that they loved every minute of it.

We also got to ride an Ural with side car from one of the guys at the meeting (thank you Miles) and it sparked the motorcycle bug again with both of us….

From the meeting we went towards Vancouver, but driving there in one day was way too long, so we stopped along the way to camp for the night. I was just about to make dinner, when a couple came over to us and told us that they loved the van and that they were just talking to each other about buying one like it. One thing led to another and they asked us if we could stop at their place in Vancouver to talk a bit more about maybe selling the van to them. So the next day we went for dinner with Joseph and Marcy and we had an overall lovely time talking about life, travelling and Peanut. The day after that, after spending the night in the van in their lovely quiet street, they told us that they would probably not be able to buy the van, and we were actually quite relieved, because otherwise that would have been the end of our Northern America adventure and we still have so much to see here. Joseph gave us a tour of Vancouver the next day and we saw where he worked and had some great sushi with him. After saying our goodbyes, we went to lie at the beach for a while and enjoyed the vibe of Vancouver. It’s a very vibrant place and it would definitely be in our top 5 of cities we could live in.

Some fancy shoe shop:

After Vancouver, we took the ferry to Vancouver Island to see the Canadian rainforest and the super big spruce trees they have there. We had a lot of nice, but mostly wet walks and could just refrain ourselves from hugging some trees.

In the end we finally saw the last creature we still hadn’t seen before in Canada. After the moose, the elk, the sea lions and the bison, we finally saw the trolls…

Looks like some Sci-Fi movie, no?

In the end we truly did go from coast to coast here in Canada, from the Atlantic to the Pacific but after 2 months we will be glad to finally go to the United States…