Things That I have Learned On My Trip To Port Alberni!

1) Vancouver island is "The Land That Time Forgot!"™ Old hippies with equally old dogs mingling with a highly mobile yet laid back younger crowd. Many, many people who commute to the oilsands at Fort McMurray or Calgary AB for work and still live here in the area, like a big suburb with low wattage lighting. Low population density, some interesting folks to be sure. Great lifestyle. Never a dumb conversation (baked guy in the bar admits to holidaying in Torsten, Honduras when the winter clouds get him down, he's like 60ish). A climate which rarely exceeds +6℃/+23℃ through the year, low level cop presence. Not everyone has a smart phone. Fun fact.

2) No straight lines by road. Internet sez 50 km as the crow flies being the distance between the YQQ airport at Comox and Port Alberni for example, in reality the drive takes 1.25hrs through some drop dead gorgeous country (see pics). Cheapest rental car is $50/day while Ambassador Shuttle Service is $125 one way. By way of comparison my man Bob with United Taxi here in Port Alberni sez his rate one way is $216! I'm still searching for a better deal but my hopes aren't high. Still have to check out Island Chauffeur.

3) Air travel is something you have to figure out if you want to survive. CMA (Central Mountain Air) is a well connected service with Comox being the hub for flights inland and Vancouver (which is why the Comox/Cambell River/Port Alberni and valley is so popular, plus real estate is well below the 1.3 million starter home in Vancouver) but there are smaller carriers for hopping around the island like KD Air or any number of terrifying float planes. It cost me $409 to fly in from Winnipeg on a Tuesday and it looks like it will be $625 to fly out of Comox on a Tuesday. If I had known more about the job I would have booked round trip airfare, but it's not a perfect world. Flying out on a Sunday would be $1,200. Complete craziness. Better to stay an extra day or two and try to argue the invoice.

4) A 750ml bottle of JD's is $30. My man Steve at the cold beer and liquor store is originally from Montreal. I didn't recognize a single bottle of wine in his shop. Not one.

5) Everyone seems to be from somewhere else.

6) It's so civil here I can barely stand it. Even the drunks/addicts are well behaved as they try to scam your taxi driver into fronting them a lift to be paid for tomorrow like Wimpy feeding his burger Jones. Most of you are probably too young to catch that.

7) Tonight there is a wedding and most of the peeps are staying here in my hotel on my floor. Not a noise. Completely quite. And they aren't all olds! Some of the guests arrived on bicycles and left them in the lobby.

8) Almost everyone over a certain age is a laid off worker from Catalyst, the local Paper mill which is right here in town a 5 minute walk from my hotel. There are sea lions in the river right outside the mill, bears when the water level drops later in the fall. As a matter of fact the bears have been known to congregate around the front lobby of the hotel (Best Western Barclay). This is from Bob the taxi dude, I think he's jerk'n my chain. Still, when I was working the LNG on Sakhalin island in the Russian Far East there were whales in Aniva Bay and the project hired bear hunters to keep the critters out of camp. Fortunately nothing was killed while I was there. Except for a poor half tame camp fox that was in the wrong place at the wrong time and ran across a drunk Russian who promptly skinned him and left the carcass on the steps to his shack. I don't make this up folks. Ask Colin with Kentech.

Bad pics, I can't get anything worthwhile out of my freaking phone. Old growth forest. Deep emerald green that reminded one of fairy's, leprechauns and provoked a desire to doff ones clothes and masturbate wildly. Or maybe that was just me.

And I must admit as I suck out of the bottle of 2009 Chase Warren Merlot, the grapes are just fine, very, very, fine.