Day 3!!

Well day 3 saw us leaving our B&B and heading North again in the rental car. We had to be in Port Hardy by 1 ish and we made it. Barely. The drive was about 4 hours and it rained almost the whole time. On and off. We stopped at one town to buy more batteries for the camera and spent almost a hour looking for a fuel station and buying batteries. The town was amazingly short on fuel stations. Port Hardy was worse. They only had 1 that we could find. Oh and the price of fuel jumped 12 cents between the 2 towns. (about 2 hours apart!!) There was quite a bit of traffic on the road mostly truckers and RVs pulling boats. Papa passed LOTS of them and managed to get out in front and then it was clear sailing all the way to Port Hardy. When we got to Port Hardy we checked into our hotel (honeymoon suite!!) and topped off the car before bringing it back. The car rental guy was the friendliest guy we meet on our entire trip. He chatted about everything. Telling us a lot about Port Hardy and what to do and where to eat. He suggested we take a trail down to the river and watch the bears come out to eat the salmon that were getting ready to go up river. Papa and I thought about it for a bit but ultimately decided NOT to. In a car... yes. On foot 20 minutes walk from the nearest town?? No thanks. We've seen lots of bears and didn't feel like being prey. Though it would have been fun in a car. Instead we found a local diner and had lunch and walked along the few streets that had little stores on them. But it really was a foul dock area. Smelly and growing and gross and we didn't spend too much time there. Of all the docks we saw this was the worst. The people were not super friendly and there was very little to do. Thankfully we only had the afternoon and evening to spend there. So we headed back to the hotel and watched the wharf from the balcony and took pictures of the boats where we didn't have to smell gross rotting fish. On the other side of the bay from us was a cannery and a log yard. The cannery had fishing boats unloading (though we couldn't see much.) but the log yard was COOL. They had these little tough boats that blew BLACK smoke (which is how we noticed them.. you could barely see them in the logs) and they worked as skidders and moved the logs here and there. Then a self loader loaded his truck with these logs that the skidder boats brought him. It was neat to watch them move the logs around in the water. The salmon were congregating in the harbor and doing a lot of jumping. We could hear them every few seconds..Plop. Plop. It was cool. Even when it got dark we could still hear them. They will go up the rivers soon. The room had a big tub and we had a nice soak to get the smell off us. Watched TV for a bit (They had a VCR but no place to rent movies?? Weird town.) and went to bed early so we could be ready for our Ferry shuttle at 5 am!!! The room at the hotel.

A salmon jumping.

The little skidder boats.

A Port Hardy sign.

The wooden carrot. If you can, read the sign. Kinda neat.

A huge sail boat that came into Port Hardy while we were there. The man working on the boat below thought that the sailboats mast was at least 110 feet tall!!

A character boat in dry dock.

On the road to Port Hardy.

At Port Hardy... See the guy running to get into his picture!

A rain speckled view of a mountain on the way to Port Hardy.

We saw this view a lot during the 1st few hours of our drive.

Some cute signs at our B&B.

Our B&B.