This May is our 25th wedding anniversary. If you remember last year I mentioned we were going to take a trip to Iceland. Unfortunately that fell through. My wife had a serious illness last year and she is still not recovered enough to the point where she can hike again. There is not much point going to Iceland if we cannot hike at all so we are delaying that trip for now. Instead, we decided to take a weekend trip to Shelter Cove, a place where neither of us had been before. My wife loves the ocean so it was a perfect getaway. We took our puppy Journey as well. It is a dog friendly place and she had a lot of fun running on the beaches.
The road to Shelter Cove is one of the worst I have driven. Twenty miles of head spinning, very slow going, very windy, losing your lunch type of roads. I only wanted to drive this road down and back out once and once only (but of course I drove it twice). There is little to do in Shelter Cove. Very few stores and shops. There are three beaches. We spent a lot of time on the beaches and Journey loved it. We saw a lot of wildlife: sea lions, seals, pelicans, deer, elk, and even a whale (in the far distance). We had a view of the ocean from our hotel room and could see the seals on the rocks below us. In fact, the seals were out there on the rocks the entire day, not moving at all (they were alive – I went down to check – what a life they must have!). It was a very relaxing weekend. Just what we needed.
I did have hopes of seeing at least one new waterfall in the area. The first morning I had severe pain in my neck, mostly caused by not having brought my own pillow from home. Journey was not feeling well that first day either so we decided to just sleep in. The second day we were both feeling better so we got up very early and went on a hike. We hiked all the way down to the ocean, a 1300 ft. descent. There we came across a large herd of elk (including some big ones) and they were blocking our path. They would not let us by them and in fact started to come towards us. Probably they were just curious (of Journey) but I did not feel comfortable walking by them and there was no way to get around. We had our breakfast and then hiked back up to the car.
I was disappointed since I’ll probably not ever be back there (though maybe I will someday). On the drive home I thought I should get at least one waterfall so we stopped at 50 ft. Dora Falls. It is one of the prettiest waterfalls you will ever see. It is a short hike and all three of us went up to see it. I was very happy to find that it was still in shade and good to photograph. I did not expect that since it was almost noon when we got there. It was a perfect relaxing weekend in Shelter Cove.
June 4th, 2024 at 3:31 pm
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