August 23, 2016
Day 2 - Lake Cowichan to Lizard Lake: Sleeping in is NOT a good idea!
Yep, we decided that after such a long day yesterday, we deserved to sleep in this morning, so were up at 8:00 - big mistake, but I'll get to that later. We enjoyed coffee and scones at our picnic table and filled up our water bottles at the campground office before leaving at 10:30. Today we were headed to Lizard Lake, a wilderness campground outside of Port Renfrew. After speaking to our buddies, we figured that since this was a provincial campground, there would be fresh water available. However, we decided to be careful about water consumption today just in case (thankfully!).
We had been warned that this was an active logging area, so should be on the watch for logging trucks on the road. Although we did see some during the day, it turns out we were heading the right way as the fully loaded trucks were always on the other side of the road from us. Traffic was minimal and it is so quiet out there, you can hear a car or truck coming from a long way off, so the road felt totally safe all day.
However, as the morning progressed, we saw the error in our ways! We were heading up and over a pass topping out at 404 meters. Towards the top, we were fully in the sun and I was dying, so I hopped off and walked the last bit. We made it to a shady spot off to the side and stopped for a much needed lunch break.
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Back on the road, it was a screaming downhill ride. We coasted almost the entire way to Lizard Lake - at least it felt like we did! A few kilometres from our camp site, we stopped at a roadside view spot. This one was a very large spruce tree - truly massive! The best part, though, was when we stopped in the parking lot. A family had also just stopped and the dad went back to their vehicle, reached in and came back to give me a bottle of water that was mostly frozen! I'm not kidding when I say I had tears in my eyes! It was such a generous act and after a long, hot ride, nothing could have been better! Thank you so much!!!!
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After that, it was a quick ride down the road to our camp site for the night - Lizard Lake. As it turned out, there was no water at all here, so we were fortunate that we had conserved our water this day. It meant we couldn't make coffee in the morning, but as Port Renfrew was just a short 20 km down then road, we weren't concerned. We had enough for the night and food for dinner and a light breakfast. We changed into our swimsuits and headed to the lake to cool off. No pics of the lake, sorry to say - didn't want to bring the camera into the water!
After dinner and a few hands of Gin, it was time to put the food up in a tree for the night. Having never done this, it took us a few tries, but we finally managed (really, Jim managed - I just gave helpful advice) to get the two bags up into a tree, where they remained, unmangled by beast or man until morning.
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Second Day stats: Distance 46 km; time riding 3 hours; total time 5 hours; avg speed 15.6 km/hr; top speed 47.8 km/hr
Today's ride: 46 km (29 miles)
Total: 120 km (75 miles)
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