Our day started out with the kids playing with the kids from the next campsite. The other kids had been building a fort up above the campground. My kids helped finish it up (I would say the other kids did most of the work over several days) and played in it. It was quite solidly built.

We have plans for dinner with my mom tonight at a restaurant and a ferry in the morning so we took the morning to grab another round of showers over at my mom’s. That took all morning so we relaxed and enjoyed the view.

We had a picnic lunch out on the deck and then went down to the beach to explore. Tide pools can be so much fun. We saw all sorts of critters: crabs, limpets, barnacles, snails urchins, sea anemone and far fewer starfish than I would have expected. It turns out there is a disease running through the populations that appears to be linked to raising ocean temperatures.

Margaret found this really cool ‘Fish rock’. Clearly it flaked off a bigger rock in a nice fish shape. The eye I’m not sure about. It could be natural as a lot of the area has rocks with large holes. The rocks are a mixture of two types and one erodes much faster. This doesn’t really look like that. The other is it was drilled long ago for an anchor point for some structure.

In the late afternoon we went and did the Pender Island museum. This was your typical small community one room museum but it held memories for me. One of the pictures was of a building that burned down after I had moved. It had been through a lot of uses. The most recent was a wonderful coffee shop that I have great memories of. The location has been redeveloped now and is the restaurant that we will be going to tonight.

We also went there to try to track down prizes my kids earned for completing the National Park Explorers Program. They were the first to do it for this park and we got print outs of a PDF some printed for us back in Victoria. The metal tags with the park name on it hadn’t arrived yet. The first people we talked to turned out to be the maintenance team. They were very helpful and started calling on their cell phone people that might have the answer. As they were calling another truck pulled in with the people that we met on the hike the other day and he knew that they didn’t have them yet. He took our information and they were mailed to us. We got them just after we got home.

We had dinner with my mom and Tony. It was excellent food. After dinner we walked along the dock and Ian was a typical homeschooler. He asked a boat owner what type it was. He got an answer that I have now forgotten. I think it caught his eye because it was a beautiful wooden boat.

We went back to our campsite and packed up everything that we possibly could. We have to be at the ferry terminal a 7am and that means a 6am wakeup call.

Favorite Things…

Ian – duels with sticks
Margaret – Playing Monopoly with Ian (During the showers)
Mom – Dinner with my mom and Tony.
Philip -Museum

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