Sunday excursion: Rathtrevor Beach. Qualicum Beach. Cedar, and the Crow N Gate Pub.
This collage (above) is not Salt Spring Island. It's Qualicum Beach. On Sunday at 4pm, it's much like "downtown" Ganges by 8 pm. Deadsville except for the line up in front of Mr. Freezie ice cream which Gwen and I contributed to by imitating the crowd. The emptiness didn't make a lot of sense since just a few streets back the entire town is exploding with suburbia in the form of cookie cutter housing a.k.a my idea of hell.
We did however come across this really nice garden/home decor shop called Smithfords that had beautiful art and funky carved cats including a catfish or a cat with a fish tail that was swimming after a mouse.
I wonder what it is that makes us feel that a particular place feels like home. We could live there. And, then, others, leave us cold and it's different, thankfully, for just about everyone. Is it some dream we hold inside from childhood and the place either matches our dream or not? Is that what happens in choice of partners as well? Do they simply match some archetype we carry around? What about those of us whose archetype seems broken when it comes to finding a partner, not because there aren't people out there but because we have always been so disappointed by those who we initially thought were the archetype?
Saying that makes me realize how, that is in fact, the test. Can we get past the archetype we carry around and just be open to what comes our way instead of measuring everything against some internal fantasy that long ago has proven to be unattainable? How I digress?
After the ghost town that was Qualicum we stopped in at Little Qualicum Cheeseworks which is a really cute place. It's a working farm with a few old red tractors. You can watch them milking the cows and pet the goats and rabbits and see the baby pigs. There's a cheese farm and the Mooberry (fruit wine) winery is attached as part of the little country store. Fruit wine isn't my favorite thing but I bought Apple, Gwen bought Raspberry and they were quite tasty in a summer-only kind of way.
We headed from there in search of the Crow and Gate Pub which Gwen wanted to introduce me to. That took a lot of convoluted twists and turns. If you can find Cedar, B.C. outside Nanaimo then you can eventually find the pub which is the oldest neighborhood pub in the province. At least I think that's what it said.
When you think of a place in the province, in Canada, in some other part of the world that just really fits you - the dream you have about where you best see yourself living - where do you think that place is for you and why is that?