Day 6- Cheeses, Beaches and Aquarium

 Hi everyone, it's Elizabeth, I'll be writing the blog post today, (and since Kiera didn't do her day yet, she made the title for today). 

This morning, we woke up and headed straight to the Comox valley farmer's market. There were two parts to the market, one side had food places and the other half had other homemade crafts, like earrings and crocheted stuffies. Most of us bought pretzels, some form of baked good or a coffee from one of the stands before visiting the crafts and buying a few. 

Then, we got back into the van and drove to Elk Falls. There, we went for a short walk down to see the waterfall. Because of some construction on a dam nearby, the water levels were nearly two to five times higher than usual. 

After our walk, we got back into the van and drove to the Discovery Passage Aquarium. There, we wandered around the small aquarium and looked at all of the tanks they had. It was a catch and release aquarium too, which I think is pretty cool. We got to touch sea stars, sea cucumbers and a few other things in the touch tank. A few of our favourite sea creatures were the sea stars, the sea cucumbers and the eels. It was super cool to watch when they fed the octopus and we got to watch it move around in the tank a bunch. Another highlight was Madeline making a new best friend with a little girl we saw there.

After a short shopping break and some geography trivia in the car, we drove to Little Qualicum Cheeseworks. We started by wandering around and looking at the cows. There were some tiny, insanely cute cows (aged as young as 2-5 days old), then some slightly bigger ones (still equally cute of course) and finally, we saw a bunch of really huge cows (that were deemed slightly less cute sadly). There was also a robot that could milk the cows on it's own, which you could watch using a TV (but it was pretty hard to see what was happening because it didn't really look like anything was happening). A second robot thing pushed the hay closer to the cows, which I think was also really cool. We also saw some goats, sheep and rabbits in a separate building. After walking around, we got to try a charcuterie board so we all ate a bunch of cheeses. Some of the cheeses we got to try were Tipsy Jill, Hot Jill, Qualicum Spices and a few others. Crystal also used the fresh whole milk (4.25%MF) dispenser so we got to try some milk too. We also got to eat some dried figs but no one really liked those. 

At this point, it started to rain a little so we had to make a change of plans. Instead of mini-golfing as planned, we went to a beach for a bit. We waded into the water (Claire and Madeline tried to swim but got cold fast) and then decided that the rocks were a bit too poky and a sandy beach would be better. So then we set out to find a sandy beach and we hung out there for a bit longer. Claire and Madeline tried to make a "crab hotel", Celeste found some cool shells, Sydney and Crystal explored a little further down the beach and the rest of us just threw rocks into the water.

After the beach, we ordered pizza and headed back to the hotel. The rest of the evening is still undetermined but for now, that was today! It's crazy to think we're already so far into the trip! Thanks for reading the blog today!