We had a quieter day today, i.e. no travel; a rest day. I did a run into Tofino and scoped out town a bit. Unfortunately, it was bike to work and school day, and I was sharing the bike path with quite a few adults and kids on bikes, so there was a lot of crowding and dodging.

When I came back, I took the dogs down to the beach and let Tim have a lie-in to recover a bit from all of his driving. We gave the dogs a slightly early lunch and then drove into Tofino and wandered around for a couple of hours. It's an interesting mix of a few high-end boutiques, a regular grocery store and a drugstore, and some tacky souvenir and shell shops, plus a few restaurants, of course. Tim got some smoked, cured salmon from a Native vendor. 

We were back at our rental house by mid-afternoon. We took the dogs back to the beach and managed to pick up a friend called Harriet, a lovely fox-red Lab with a bit of a limp on her hind leg. She just had this look about her that she was searching for someone, and I sensed she was lost, though perhaps not panicking about it. We asked the few people we encountered on the way back up the beach if they knew anything about her, to no avail, and as is to be expected, the various dog people and their dogs all congregated and problem-solved together. Harriet had a phone number on her name tag, and someone managed to get a cellular signal and call, only to get voicemail. In the end, Harriet attached herself to some dogs and people who were staying just a few houses down from us, and who were local to B.C. We exchanged numbers so that we could do further assistance if need be. We came back to our house and did reverse lookup on the phone number and it appeared to belong to a construction worker from Ucluelet, 30 km to the south. An hour or so later, we got a text to say her person had been tracked down. But we did come this close to bringing a third dog home with us...if we weren't crossing the US border again next week, I think we would have genuinely done it.

The sunset is in about an hour, so I'll have a wander down to photograph that. It's patently obvious why this is called the Gold Coast of B.C. - everything was gilded in sunlight last night.