Friday Jun 12 - Sunday Jun 21 Just outside of Nanaimo, BC
We spent a week and a bit Brannen Lake RV Park & Campground just down the hill from the jail on Jingle Pot.
On Friday, after setting up in our assigned site, we took a stroll to the park's private beach on Brannen Lake. It was quite a hike; a lot further than we thought. We walked through the park then along a private road and eventually arrived at the lake.
The park is actually quite large with serviced and non-serviced sites scattered among the forest.
On our way back from the beach we took one of the paths back out to the road. The grass was certainly healthy!
As we walked through the park, I pointed out this interesting bit of vegetation to Jen. Anyone know what it is?
Whatever it was, it was growing on a branch along with some moss. Very interesting.
Here's our site...
The trail through the park was advertised as "wheelchair" friendly. That's all we needed, so off we went. We started where the map above says "You are here".
We followed the path towards the lake then walked across the spillways.
On Friday (19th) we drove to Colliery Dam Park.
Jen was enjoying the smooth paved surface of the trail. I was starting to fall behind.
We were enjoying our walk but I was starting to get a bit concerned. We hadn't seen seen any indication of the water behind the Middle Colliery Dam and we appeared to have missed a turn that should have got us heading back to where we started.
As well, we had walked quite some distance (down hill of course) along side the Nanaimo Parkway. Something is definitely not right and it was confirmed when I saw this in the tarmac.
Look what's on the back side of this stump - the cutouts that the loggers used to insert planks to stand on to cut down the tree. No chainsaws in those days!
This was interesting. We'd seen a couple of examples of this at the park.
Our week at Brannen Lake was fairly low-key. We had lots of walks around the park, visited a couple of coffee shops, did some chores, got Alfie looked at and generally relaxed. So not terribly exciting for you dear reader.
We left Brannen Lake RV on Monday Jun 22 and drove south to Bamberton Provincial Park, just on the north side of the Malahat by Mill Bay.
Join us there.
A cyclist stopped and we asked him if he knew where we were according to the picture of the park map I had taken at the start of our walk. Long story short, we decided to head back the way we had come. Of course, now we were faced with a long albeit gradual climb back to where we thought we'd missed a turn.
Nope, something is not right. Well, best to keep going back along the path, back to where we started.
So what happened? Well, you cannot see it in the park map above, but the trail we had walked is the "Parkway Trail". It runs through the Colliery Dam park. When I looked VERY closely at the map board, I could just make out where we had gone astray.
The signs saying"Wheelchair friendly" related to the Parkway Trail. The Colliery Dam walk is part Parkway Trail and part gravel/dirt paths around the two dams.
I tell you. If anyone at the park's board in Nanaimo wants a tip - SIGN the trail so other newbies to the park don't make the same mistake!
But no harm done. We had a nice walk.
We hopped in Alfie and drove along Nanaimo Lakes Road to the parking area between the two dams.
Here we are looking at the water behind the Middle Colliery Dam and the spillway which takes the water to Lower Colliery Dam.
