We booked a cottage to spend Halloween weekend on Galiano. A couple of months back, Justine had organized a foraging tour on the island with Swallow Tail Tours. We had done a couple of event with Chef Robin previously, and we were hoping she could help us make more out of our time on the island. Justine booked a combo mushroom/sea foraging session and had organized a number of the neighbors on Panorama Lane to join us.
We took the ferry over on Friday night and had our first experience (not too bad after more than 2 years) with missing our reservation window! By 8 minutes… Which meant we lost our reservation and spent the next 20 minutes being worried that we were not going to make the sailing. For whatever reason, traffic coming our of Vancouver was really slow and we didn’t account for it. Don’t people know we’re in a pandemic and that they’re all supposed to stay home? But we made the sailing - there was lots of room despite the site saying the sailing was full - and so our weekend got off to a good, if somewhat stressful start.
Our little cabin at Driftwood.
Off the ferry, we made the short drive over to Driftwood and checked in. There was still a fair bit of light left, we we walked up to the point to see if there was anything going on. Sadly it was very quiet, with only a few seals to keep us company.
It’s a horrible photo, but this seal had quite a bit fish in it’s mouth!
We headed back to the the cabin and settled in for a relaxing evening. We made a fire and watched a movie and had a drink or two before calling it a night.
Saturday morning, there were deer outside the front window grazing on the lawn. Being hunting season (I think it’s still on) the deer have been scarce. The course was at 10:00, so we had a lazy morning then headed over to the Mount Galiano parking lot. The whole crew was there - there ended up being 11 of us - and Robin was excellent as always.
She started with mushrooms and gave us an overview of what we could find on Galiano, including a lot of samples and details on how to ID. She then did a bit of an overview on sea foraging and provided more samples. It was good. We then walked down to the beach and she found some things to demonstrate what she had been explaining.
After the beach, we came back up to the parking lot and then headed out into the forest to look for mushrooms. While we didn’t find any of the “interesting” ones (i.e. edible) we did find lots of cool ones, just on our short little walk.
And not just mushrooms, a banana slug as well!
The course was a little more than 2 hours and was a lot of fun! We learned a lot, but I’m not convinced Justine will eat foraged mushrooms. And there is a lot of risk. After the course we headed back to the cottage and had some lunch, then headed up to the property.
Dana and Bradley had some friends visiting and were sitting around a fire, so we hung out with them for a while. It was fun. After, we did need to get some work done so we headed back to our place and tackled a few small projects. We planted a bunch of bulbs for the spring, and then I tackled a bunch of the boome.
While we were sitting over at Dana’s we had seen a few humpbacks out on the ocean. Later in the afternoon, Justine managed to see more of them - or maybe the same ones. They were quite close and quite loud - you could hear them each time they came up for air.
Soon enough it was getting dark and it was time to head back to the cottage. We made some dinner, made another fire and had a nice evening. We played some cards, watched a couple of shows and enjoyed the fire.
Sunday morning I played a quick round of golf. It was beautiful day, and I managed to put the knowledge from Saturdays foraging to good use, and found some shrimp mushrooms on the golf course!
There were a group of big shrimp mushrooms under some douglas firs.
Nice creamy white cap and gills with the pink stem
And the stem bruises brown when sliced with a finger nail
After my round of golf (it was a bit of a mixed bag…) I picked up coffee for Justine and a cinnamon bun for us to share from the bakery (so good…) and headed back to the cottage. We had some breakfast and then packed up and headed up to the property.
On the way up, we headed further up island to have a look at a place that the guy who built our power shed is working on. It’s going to be amazing when it’s done. As we were close, we made a quick stop at one of the government docks. We sawa kingfisher and a bald eagle and then saw a big sea lion swimming by.
Swimming upside down
It was pretty cold on the water so we didn’t stay too long and headed back to the property. Our main goal for the day was to finish the trim on “shed #2”. It was almost done - I had run out of cedar to finish the soffits and the peaks, so that was out plan for the day.
We also needed to fix the solar panel. Earlier in the fall it looked like the battery got drained. So we recharged it, re-wired the battery and charge controller and got everything working nicely again. Composting toilet is back to fully operational!
Sadly that took us through most of the afternoon - days are short this time of year. We didn’t want it to be all work so we called it in the afternoon, packed up and walked down to the beach access. Along the way, there were of course mushrooms!
This beach was also pretty quiet - a few seals, a sea lion and not a lot else. But as the sun was setting we did get a pretty nice sunset.
As ther ferry was not until 7:45, we booked dinner at the Galiano Inn. In the winter they do a nice prime rib dinner and we enjoyed a leisurely dinner then headed for home.