Horseshoe Bay and Deep Cove

These places mark the most westerly and easterly points of North Vancouver, and they had cool names so I thought I'd visit.

Both are kind of pretty and have nice little harbours and lovely vistas, but in all honesty there's not much to actually do in either of them - though i imagine if i went in the summer, there would be a number of nice trails to go walking on. That, and Horeseshoe Bay is the ferry port for going to a number of the local islands, including Nanaimo on Vancouver Island.

Horseshow Bay (according to the sign that I took a picture of!) has been a popular fishing and recreation area for over a hundred years, and is terribly quaint, in a Canadiany kind of way. However, it was popular before that when native people went there to gather herrings eggs. There you go, interesting fact for the day, done.

Looking out from the village:


The very small village:


I guess maybe it's not thrilling, but it would be a lovely place to relax surrounded by mountains and sea.

I don't know how well you'll be able to see this, but one of the nicest bits of the bay was when the weather turned all indecisive and the sun was shining on Bowen Island, whilst dark clouds surrounded the other side, and in the middle a large rainbow rose up from the sea. Very cool:




Anywayz, Deep Cove. Deep Cove looked kind of similar, except by that point it had snowed very heavily on the mountains, so it's surrounding mountains were all pretty and white (as you can see in the last blog post).

I didn't take many photos there since it was freezing cold and getting dark, however, I was rather amused (in an extremely geek chic sort of a way) by a sign i saw in a flower bed:



It's always nice when the gardening department has a sense of humour...

And opposite the very same flowerbed, there was some more nice wall art:


One thing I would say about both of the villages was that i think they gave me a bit of a taste of non-Vancouver Canada. Not that there's anything wrong with Vancouver, but there are so many people in it from all over the world, that i imagine it is quite different from quite a large amount of the rest of Canada. So maybe I've got the taste to explore a little further afield, or more remote or local places later on in my stay.