My wife and I over our years of traveling together maintain a friendly, slightly tongue in cheek banter about one aspect of our travel plans for every trip. When we’ve settled on a location, her internet sleuthing very quickly goes to searching out zoos, aquariums and other animal-related adventures we could get up to. Somewhere on our life journey together I issued an edict…. only one zoo per year. Don’t get me wrong… I love animals. An occasional zoo, especially a renowned one like in San Diego, say…. I’m all in. But given the choice of spending part of a day looking at animals or wandering a new locale, I’m going to opt for the latter 99 times out of 100.
When we were making plans for our time on Vancouver Island my wife found a wildlife sanctuary focused on birds of prey that was serendipitously located just off the highway on our way to a cottage as we travelled to Qualicum Bay. As she dug further into it she discovered that not only could we walk around and look at hawks and owls and such, but we could also get up close experiences with a variety of raptors. I’ll admit, that sounded pretty cool. So my 2022 “zoo” was going to be something called “The Raptors” just outside Duncan, BC.
Bluenose Traveler 