My First Day out of the House

After a long trip sealed in an envelope I finally arrived on Hornby Island and met my new friends, Doug and Rachelle. Hornby Island is in the Salish Sea between Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia. Here is a map showing Hornby Island. You can zoom in or out to get a good idea of where it is.

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To get to Hornby Island from the rest of Canada means taking 3 different ferries. The last ferry to Hornby starts at 7:30AM and stops running at 6PM. Outside of those times you can't get on or off the island unless you have your own boat.

The first day or so I stayed inside getting over jet lag and getting to know my new friends. Doug and Rachelle moved to Hornby Island five years ago, built a house, and became very active in the community. Doug is a carpenter and the Deputy Fire Chief, and Rachelle is a writer and potter.

The winter weather on Hornby is usually mild and rainy. Yesterday, though, it got really cold and snowed. This doesn't happen very often so we went out to see what it looked like. Our first stop was to the firehall. Doug is Duty Officer this week so we drove the fire department pickup. Here I am sitting on the truck's antenna at the firehall.

Hornby Island is a rural community. There are almost 1000 people that live here full time, but in the summer time there are almost 5000 people that live here. People come from all over the world to visit the beautiful ocean coastline and at times in the summer there can be as many as 10,000 on this small island.

Here is a section of coastline a short walk from Doug and Rachelle's. I'm sitting on the rock but you can barely see me. You can see all the tilted sandstone layers down by the water that were pushed up millions of years ago by the earth's plates moving around. You'll have to ask your teacher how that works. Doug explained it to me, but I think he was just making it up as he went along.

Thanks for checking in on my 'blog. I'll show some more photos tomorrow.