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On Thursday morning I was up at 5:15AM (!!!) to begin the LONG journey to Port McNeill to see my lovely friend Maggie :) Maggie & I were roomies the season that I lived & Whistler, and I haven't seen her since I left there about 2½ years ago. She lives over on Vancouver Island in a town called Port McNeill, which is up the northern end of the island on the east coast. Turns out it's quite a mission to get there…
From JL's place I had to take a bus down to the bottom of Main Street, the sky train to get into town, then walk to a bus station where I got on the Horseshoe Bay Express to take me to a ferry terminal about 40 minutes out of Vancouver. From there I caught a 2 hour ferry over to Nanaimo, which is in the south of Vancouver Island, & from that point it's a 5 hour Greyhound bus ride up the coast to Port McNeill! Phew! So I left JL's place at about 5:45AM & got to Port McNeill around 4:30PM…as you no doubt may have guessed, Maggie is a very special friend of mine, otherwise there's no bloody way I'd spend almost 12 hours in transit either way to get my butt up to Port McNeill to spend only a couple of days with her! :P
The big plus about any of this kind of travel in British Columbia (the Canadian state in which Vancouver is located) it that pretty much anywhere you go is incredibly picturesque. This made the bus & ferry rides much more bearable! Not to mention that the ferry was one of the ritziest ferries I've ever seen in my entire life. It was HUGE! Like 6 or 7 stories tall…with a kid's playground, a games arcade, a huge cafeteria as well as a couple of other smaller cafes, a gift shop…it was like the ferry version of the QE2! So I was travelling in style ;) Even the Greyhound bus ride was alright - there seems to be a pretty notable difference between Greyhound Canada & the Greyhound that operates in the USA…with Greyhound Canada being the preferred mode of travel!
We were running about an hour late by the time we arrived so we didn't get into Port McNeill until 5:30PM, but there was the lovely Miss Maggie waiting to pick me up from the bus station. Port McNeill is a pretty tiny place with probably around 3500 residents, & Maggie's family live a ways out of the centre of town in a lovely house that her parents built many years ago, complete with a greenhouse in the yard. Maggie's mum prepared a lovely dinner that evening & I tried some of her Dad's homemade blackberry/blueberry wine, which was delicious!
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