Janet Brien's photos with the keyword: East Sooke Regional Park

(+10 insets!) (view large for more fun details!) ACK! Where Have I Been?! My apologies for the absence and my lack of visits. I'm guilty of diving into an online game that I love, and it's swept me away with its extreme engagement. The game of RIFT allows me to do things I cannot do in real life and every once in a while I just gotta go be a magical being. I'm not "full" yet so I won't be around here very much until I'm satisfied. I'm going to do my best to post and visit but please forgive my lag in participation! Today's Pictures Today I'm posting the last set from our incredible hike at Eastern Sooke Regional Park. Places like this are why we love to travel. Our eyes were opened to the extreme beauty of Vancouver Island's southern coastline and we learned the difference between normal hiking trails in Canada vs. the US. Although this particular trail turned out to be the most extreme of the entire trip on the island, it made us aware that trails tend to be a bit tougher and wild, with assumptions that the hiker is naturally careful and fit enough to take on challenges along the way. Game on! We loved it so much! My main picture shows another lovely coastal view, accented by Secretary Island in the distance. If you look on the beach in the lower left you'll see the enormous driftwood tree stump that I shared in my last set (I'll add the picture again as an inset). Insets of our hike include: a neat panorama of the beach at the beginning of the hike which will give you a sense of the beauty of the area, a group of mushrooms I found, some atmospheric forest images, dried peapods with peas inside, and an oil tanker in the misty distance. I'm also posting pictures of an old bus that was parked at the RV campground we were staying at. It was so old and decrepit that I couldn't resist immortalizing it! Of course I needed to find out more. First off, there are many people who have taken old busses and turned them into travel coaches. The front of this bus has a backwards sign reading "Re-Tyred" and I expect that it has seen a lot of country in its day. Digging further, I learned that this was one of the busses used in Canada's Greyhound fleet, made by Motor Coach Industries in 1950. I am so happy I took pictures because they turned out really well! :) Finally, I'm including a picture of our Grey Wolf trailer and our truck, parked at our Malamat Mountain RV campsite. This location turned out to be perfect for us. Only about 30 minutes from Victoria, just minutes from Goldstream Provincial Park and about 45 minutes-hour from East Sooke Regional Park, it was a very nice hub to base our southern Vancouver Island adventures. The RV "resort" was a bit run-down but nice enough. Many people actually lived there full-time, something we noticed a lot of on our travels. There was a very homey quality to the place and our experience there was very nice. Pam, what's the weather like for you right now? It's been raining cats and dogs on and off for the past few days. I'm glad because it's been an extremely dry fall and early winter and we really need to get the water table rebuilt. Is it dry where you live too? I sure do hope that you are feeling well and shoring up your energies for your upcoming procedure. I'm very happy to read that things are moving along…now you just need to set the appointment! *GREAT BIG HUGS from southern Oregon* Explored on 12/13/19; highest placement #5.

(+9 insets!) (Please scroll down to Today's Pictures for inset information) Continuing with Our Vancouver Island Trip! The drive out to East Sooke Regional Park on Vancouver Island was really beautiful and took us on twisting roads with lovely views of forest and coast. I'd seen pictures and read reviews--the Coast Trail was raved as a MUST NOT MISS hike, and so we went! They were right, and this walk turned out to be one of the most scenic coastal hikes we'd ever been on in our lives! This lovely park features more than 50km amongst its dozens of trails that showcase Sooke's breathtaking forest and coastal scenery. The area was historically prized for its natural resources--logging, mining and fishing--but today you'd never know how important it was in this regard. Instead, this park is now a jewel for all who love the outdoors, with facilities for picnics and group outings as well as challenging remote trails which require a pickup if an entire hike is attempted. We would very much love to go back to this area and spend a couple of weeks traversing its trails. The jaw-dropping beauty was astonishing and though we didn't get to see as much as we wanted to, our choice of the most popular Coastal Trail was perfect. One of the things we weren't prepared for was how much climbing and scrambling we would be doing to follow the trail. In fact, there were many places where the only way we knew where to go was to search out the little yellow trail markers which pointed the way. It was a lot of fun though, and both of us are in fine shape for arduous treks and so we loved the adventure of occasionally needing to find our way! Now, had the trail been straight and easy to negotiate, we might have been able to walk the extent of this amazing out-and-back hike, but it was not to be. It didn't help that we started later than we wanted to and took longer to get to the trail head than we expected. As we set out on the wide, straight walkway that made a beeline from the parking lot out to the trail head at the coast, we wished we'd had our bikes with us. The park, however, didn't allow them. Once we got to the start of the Coast Trail, it soon became obvious why bikes were denied—at least on this trail. Almost immediately there were rocks and roots on the path and some very steep bits on an extremely narrow path. Then we found ourselves imitating billy goats as we crawled up and over huge, mountainous chunks of lichen and moss-covered rocks. I couldn't help myself from stopping to appreciate the colorful succulent, sedum, which clung in great clumps to crevices in the stone. How odd, I thought, to find this plant here, of all places! In any event, we were soon laughing hysterically at our desire to ride our bikes on this trail. Hah! Even the most masterful of mountain bike riders would not be able to negotiate some of the areas we traversed. Bike riding indeed! And so in the end, we had to turn around much earlier on the trail than we'd hoped. However, as we usually do, we found a fine place for our lunch and sat with a beautiful view of the coast to look out on. We munched happily on our sausage, cheese, and fauxtato salad (incredible potato salad made with cauliflower) and talked blissfully about this amazing place we were so lucky to have the chance to visit. Today's Pictures My main picture is one of the amazing coastal views that we got to see along the trail. The cove that's dotted with floating bull kelp had us both picturing how wonderful it would be if we were scuba diving there, though it would certainly be very cold! The insets I'm sharing show some of the cool finds we discovered along the way. It was such a treat to find a number of mushrooms and I was very happy that my Sony was able to take nice pictures that I could share! Other images include the wide, sun-dappled path out to the coast, lots of coastal views and forest highlights as well. ENJOY! Pam, I know you love places like this and Steve and I mentioned you in our conversation as we sat eating our lunch. I don't think you would have appreciated the extremely strenuous nature of the hike though! It was sometimes such a treacherous climb that the little yellow trail signs—literally pounded into the rock face—showed a picture directing people to take turns one by one, so as to keep rocks from falling onto the person below! YIKES! Still, it was great fun and heck, we'd just pick you up and piggy-back you along for the ride! HAH! Ok, well, Steve would do that part but I'd take pictures! :D :D Hope this cold, rainy and misty day is treating you well in your neck of the woods! *BIG HUGS* from southern Oregon! Explored on 12/09/19; highest placement #20.

(+10 insets!) (Please scroll down to "Today's Pictures" for image information) Trip Talk: A Much Heavier Trailer Means More Upgrades to the Truck When you buy an RV that's built better, it weighs a LOT more. The RV industry has many tiers of build qualities because they want to have models available for every vehicle out there, whether it's wise or not. They are so focused on making money that they sacrifice safety, quality, and common sense to get customers. A large number of the trailers out there are marketed as being very light so that lower-end, less powerful vehicles can pull them. We learned the hard way what that really means: flimsy construction using materials that cannot handle the stresses of being on the road and the countless issues that come up along the way. Our Forest River Cherokee Grey Wolf 26DBH only weighed about 6200 pounds when empty and had a maximum capacity of about 7800 pounds. That lightweight, shoddy construction translated into a trailer that crumpled with the stress of travel (isn't that what it's supposed to do--TRAVEL?). In comparison, our new Keystone Avalanche 365MB is about 13000 pounds empty--more than TWICE the weight of the Grey Wolf!!--and a cargo capacity of 2500 pounds, which would be 15500 pounds if fully-loaded! Everything about this trailer is much more substantial and better made (Not saying we haven't found tons of janky workmanship as we've gotten to know it. However, unlike the Grey Wolf, there haven't been any missing screws, bolts, framing or lowest-tier options). This being said, our new trailer is HEAVY! The good news is that our truck is easily powerful enough to pull it and got the trailer home just fine, and up our hill too. However, there are a couple of issues we weren't comfortable with. First of all, when the RV is hooked up to the hitch, the truck suspension is pushed down more than it should be--it's a weight-based stress that's called "squatting." Eventually this would ruin the suspension and makes for a rougher ride. The solution for this was a suspension addition called truck air bags, which Steve installed one afternoon. They can be inflated to the desired pressure so when we're not hauling the RV Steve will deflate the pressure, and when we are towing the RV he can pump them up. You should have seen the beaming expression on Steve's face when he tested them out and saw that the truck no longer "squats" when the RV is hooked up! We were so happy. Steve also took the time to show me the affect the RV had on the truck when the airbags weren't installed. I could clearly see the place where the suspension was bottoming out. Not a good thing at all. So now our truck will have the proper suspension to handle our big trailer! The other problem was much more serious: our brakes. Yes, the RV has its own brakes and they engage when the brakes in the truck are used. However, it's still not enough. We can't tell you how many stories we've read about people burning out their brakes on long hills, having accidents or near misses because their brakes couldn't handle the weight of the RV in an emergency. A normal combination of RV and truck brakes would be fine if you didn't factor in all of the hills and mountain passes. It's the long, continuous need for braking that causes the problems, but here too, there are solutions: compression release engine brakes or exhaust breaks. If you've ever noticed the loud "machine gun/jackhammer-like" sound of a semi when it's going down a hill, you're hearing what's called "engine breaking." Instead of the normal method of slowing down a vehicle with friction or magnetic brakes, the compression and release of pressure of a running engine is used to slow the vehicle down. Another version of this system is exhaust brakes. This type of engine braking is better for an engine and more effective. It works by closing off the exhaust path from the engine, creating backwards pressure which then slows the engine and thus, the speed of the vehicle. I don't know about you but I never understood the whole deal about big-rig trucks and the methods used to slow them down. I knew that with a manual-shift car, you can downshift to slow your car down instead of/in conjunction with normal breaking. However, I didn't realize how important and effective engine breaking was for extremely heavy vehicles. Steve's known that non-commercial trucks can have an engine brake installed but didn't need to consider it for our first trailer. However, the story changed once we got our new trailer. Thinking about the countless mountain passes we've gone over gave us the heebie-jeebies and it was obvious that if we hoped to travel around the country, we needed to make sure our truck was able to handle those hills without wearing out the brakes. So, a couple of days ago we brought the truck to a shop that installs these brake systems and now we have the security of Pacbrakes ready for our next adventure. As pricey as such a system may be, we will actually save a lot of money over the long run because the normal brakes on both truck and trailer will last much longer, and the wear and tear of our truck will be better as well. Today's Pictures On the third day at our first "hub" of our Vancouver Island, located at the southern end, we went to a place called East Sooke Regional Park. Wild and rugged, there are 31 miles (50km) of trails to enjoy there. We decided to go on part of their Coastal Trail and it turned out to be one of the most incredible hikes we'd ever been on. This main picture shows a beach at the start of the coastal trail and gave us a clue on the level of beauty we'd be seeing. One aspect of that particular spot was a huge surprise. My phone, which was supposed to have zero Canadian cell coverage, had extremely fast internet there because the beach pointed directly at the northern edge of Washington in the United States! Once we left the area though, I lost the connection. It was really fun to have awesome coverage for that brief moment though! :) Inset 1: The coastal views were spectacular and this panorama looked out on a breathtaking waterscape. Pay attention to that little islet. You'll see Secretary Island on display in seven pictures among my 3-part presentation of this remarkable place. Inset 2: This little bridge crossed a tiny creek that emptied out at one of the many little beaches along the Coastal Trail. The thick, healthy forest you see was typical of all the trails along the ocean's edge and we were so happy to be surrounded by so much lush foliage. Inset 3: The Coastal Trail couldn't follow the edge of the land at all times because of the rough and rocky terrain. Instead, it was more of a beautiful forest trail which popped out along the edge whenever possible. Here's another pretty scenic shot with Secretary Island accenting the view. Inset 4: You can just make out the trail in the lower left in this forest image. Densely packed with a huge variety of plants, this was the usual terrain and it never got old! Inset 5: There weren't a lot of boats in this area but this sporty fishing boat got my attention as it sped by. Inset 6: At the half-way point in our hike we had lunch at this rock-strewn hillside spot which looked out over the ocean. I remember a tasty highlight which Steve came up with…you take a barbecue pork rind, spread liverwurst on it and top with a slice of hard sausage. DELICIOUS!! (Stop wrinkling your nose, pork rinds are AWESOME and 100% keto!) The yellow-jacket wasps in the area were very keen on our offerings too but after we smacked a few into oblivion the others gave up and left us in peace. Inset 7: I was delighted to find fungus of various types along the trail. I think this is a type of bracket fungus and I just love the texture of the pores. Inset 8: This group of mushrooms looks like they have decorative edging! Inset 9: Imagine my excitement when I looked down and saw an ORCHID! I instantly thought of my good friend, Ron Hanko, who's dedicated a large chunk of his life to these beautiful flowers. This is the Elegant Piperia Orchid (Piperia elegans), a flower which can be found in Canada's British Columbia and south to central California and as far east as Montana. Inset 10: Elegant Piperia is also known as Coast Piperia, Hillside Rein Orchid, and Hillside Bogorchid. The tall spikes are composed of many dozen tiny, tightly-packed blossoms which deserve a close-up to really show lovely they are. Pam, were there pretty coastal hikes you used to frequent when you lived in England? I have certainly learned that England has a gamut of terrain types so I wouldn't be surprised if you used to walk on trails similar to this one. This hike was exactly what we'd been hoping to experience--and then some. The incredible beauty of this trail could not be properly captured In pictures but I did my best! Here's hoping all is well with you my dear! I have played around with the Circle demo you told me about and once I get one that really floats my boat, I'll post it for you! :) Explored on 11/09/19; highest placement #1.