Pacific Wild With Campgrounds

Fourteen nights on Vancouver Island and the Sunshine Coast with every campground booked in advance, which removes the one real anxiety of motorhome travel in high season.

Vancouver opens it, then a BC Ferries crossing to the island and a drive through the interior. Cathedral Grove is the first proper stop, a stand of old-growth Douglas fir and western red cedar where the largest trees are around eight hundred years old and tall enough that the canopy is hard to see.

Ucluelet follows with a full day for Pacific Rim National Park, and the options there are the strength of this itinerary: a kayak tour among the Broken Islands, a bear-watching trip out of Tofino, or a coastal cruise past the long surf beaches. Dinner at Tacofino, which started as a food truck in a Tofino car park and became an institution, is on the list.

The whale watching covers resident grey whales and humpbacks passing through on migration, with the usual caveat that wild animals arrange themselves as they please. The return crosses back through the island to Campbell River, then works down the Sunshine Coast using three more ferries, Comox to Powell River, Saltery Bay to Earls Cove and Langdale to Horseshoe Bay, which is a pleasant way to travel and breaks the driving up. Canadian Affair include the flights, the motorhome, the pre-booked campgrounds and the ferries, with fuel, insurance and meals separate. The price is per person. The campground inclusion is the quiet selling point here: Vancouver Island pitches in July and August are genuinely hard to get, and improvising one in a motorhome at six in the evening is nobody’s idea of a holiday.