Botanical Bitch

This past weekend, my mother and I made the two hour trek up the coast of Vancouver Island to visit the tiny fishing village of Port Renfrew. For any reader considering visiting this remote little get-away, let me provide you with a valuable travel tip that will save you both time and money: Don't bother.

The trip, ostensibly, was meant as a short getaway to celebrate my mother's birthday, as well as to visit our good friend Andrei, former co-director of my Doukhobor choir and now manager of the Renfrew Pub. Mom had some whimsical notion in her head of a seaside resort town that would provide a lovely mini holiday and facilitate some bonding time between us. I'm not quite sure why she thought this was going to work, since my mother and I can't be in the presence of one another for longer than half an hour without wanting to rip each others' heads off. Nevertheless, in the interests of feigning some sort of familial normalcy, we packed up the SUV and off we went.

Now, let me not decry Renfrew altogether; the natural wonder and beauty of the surroundings are quintessentially West Coast and majestic. The harbour itself is a picturesque sight to behold, with a long wooden pier, dotted by quaint guest cabins, that juts out into the waters of the Juan de Fuca strait. The cabins are pretty and boast their own little fire pits and enclosed patios. It would have been lovely to stay in one of them, but due to some misinformation and a booking error, Mom and I instead ended up in "the Lodge", a sparse yet serviceable building located up a gravel road from the Renfrew Pub.

 In true Virginia fashion, Mom wasted no time in criticizing the accommodations, the lack of decor - "Couldn't they just put up a picture or two, here?" - and the general mood of the entire place, which we quickly discovered to be a distressing mixture of apathy and affability. When Mom asked, "What time is check out?", the old man at the desk shrugged, looked confused and replied with a grin, "11, I guess?" We were provided with our room number, but had to return to the office to confirm it, since all of the rooms appeared to have two numbers on the door. Even the owners, congenial and welcoming as they were, couldn't be sure if room 105 was actually 105, or if it was 106.

Aside from a brief hike to explore the tidal pools and their strange, nautical inhabitants at Botanical Beach on Sunday afternoon, the majority of our time in Renfrew was spent at the only place to go: the pub. This actually proved to be a fairly life-affirming activity for me, especially on Saturday evening, after Mom (being wholly unaccustomed to day-drinking) had passed out, and the place was brightly lit and packed to the rafters with rugged men of the woods and tipsy fishermen in flannel shirts, drunkenly swaying to the palatable strains of a cover band.

 I walked into the place in my standard "going out" pleather leggings, and with a bit of cleavage showing, and immediately felt like a Kardashian. Free drinks were thrust at me, left and right; when I stepped outside on the porch for a cigarette, three lighters were immediately held up to my face. "Tee hee," I tittered.

Sure, most of these men probably had IQ's comparable to those of the fish they caught for a living, and all of them were cross-eyed with liquor, but I'm not ashamed to admit that being an exotic new prize among primates was more than sufficient to bolster my oft-wilting self confidence. When I decided to leave, one of the kitchen staff, who was somewhat conversant through his beer buzz, chased me out of the pub, and stumbled like a drunken zombie in front my vehicle, blocking my path for three or four minutes in the hope that I would concede to going home with him. Eventually, he tired himself out, staggered away, and I drove off up the road to the Lodge and the sanctity of my bed.

While a jolly seaside, mother-daughter bonding trip was not in the cards this time around, I did nevertheless come away from my night in Renfrew with a few good stories and a shameless feeling of validation.