The Duncan Road Trip with Katrina

Today, Katrina finally went with me on the road trip she had been talking about for months. She actually didn't really want to go today, as she had been hoping for a nice sunny day. Since my time here was running out, there wasn't really any other option apart from not doing it. Katrina was sceptical when I told her that the rain was supposed to stop around noon and that it would still be a nice afternoon - once again I turned out to be right about the weather.
We left around 11:30 AM. The first stop was the gas station, where Katrina filled the tank up. However, as she got her shoes wet in a puddle, she decided to turn around and put on some more water resistent shoes. When we left the house for the second time, we also took Jakki along.

Our first real stop was a viewpoint. It had just stopped raining when we got out of the car. Nevertheless, we couldn't really see anything at first, everything seemed really foggy all around us. I still tried to see it in a positive light: The fog made the valley below seem really mysterious. After standing at the viewpoint for a few minutes, the fog suddenly lifted and offered us a really amazing view of the sea and the mountains surrounding it. Thus we had in fact picked the perfect moment to stand there as the change in the scenery was unbelievable - within seconds, it changed from a white bulk of nothingness into an amazing picture.
Next, we stopped at Cowichan Bay, a little village right at the sea. There were a lot of little, cozy shops right at the harbour. We stopped at a bakery and Katrina got us some pretzels with cheese. I liked those pretzels espescially since they didn't really taste like typically German pretzels. As I didn't really know what it was and thought that I had never tasted it before, she also got us some shortbread cookies to try.

We kept driving North to Chemainus, the city of murals. On the way there, we actually saw a rainbow.
There were a lot of very nice murals on the walls of all the shops and official buildings in Chemainus. We walked a bit through the little town in order to get a look at the art. The city also had a lot of things reminding me of fairytales, for example a 'Hansel and Gretel' candy store. Katrina got several interesting types of fudge for us, which were really tasty, too. During our walk, we saw some people that were dressed up for Halloween. One guy in some kind of skull costume really caught our attention. After we had seen most of the city, we went back to the car and drove back South to Duncan.

Duncan was mostly famous for its totem poles and we really saw a lot of them here. There was one totem pole which had some parts made of abalone shell and that looked really nice in my opinion.
After our walk through Duncan, Katrina was hungry and we were thinking about where to buy some food. We tried a few places on the road out of Duncan, but they were either closed or their menu didn't appeal to us. Katrina actually got a bit frustrated around this time, which turned her into some kind of angry driver. I actually hadn't expected this so I felt like the situation was funny. We ended up stopping at a farmer's market, which also annoyed Katrina since she wouldn't be able to keep driving directly back home from there due to the lay-out of the road. However, she hadn't seen that problem before turning into the farmer's market's parking lot which is why she was annoyed about that. After we had had a tuna sandwich from the market, her mood lifted again.

On the way back, I proposed going to Shawnigan Lake. Katrina had mentioned th lake before and said that she would like to go there with Jakki. As it was already 5 PM, Katrina didn't really feel like going there anymore on our trip. I tried to change her mind by saying that it would be fun for Jakki and that otherwise, Jakki would be sad about not really going on a walk in nature. In truth, I just really wanted to see the lake and Katrina saw through my intentions. We still went to the lake.
Shawnigan Lake was really beautiful. It was surrounded by mountains and just when we got there, the sun started to set behind some of the mountains, which looked amazing. While we were there, it was raining a little bit from above, which was really weird as there were no clouds above us. The rain didn't bother us, though.

On the way home, Katrina also stopped at 'Thrifty Foods' in order to get some coffee and chips. I saw a box of 'Nanaimo bars'. I had never had any but I felt like they were a very typical Canadian candy. When I asked Katrina about what they tasted like, she encouraged me to buy the box. Even though I had already had too much sweet stuff today, I tasted a piece of the Nanaimo bars. It tasted like chocolate, coconut and butter cream.
We got home around 6:45 PM and then spent the evening watching 'Suits'.