Historical Artifacts
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Back on the bike again, now that we're seeing some good
weather. Yesterday was perfect for cycling (sunny, high of
18), so I took the day off work to bike the Lochside
trail. I've done the ride many times; it is for me a Peak
Cycling Experience.
The ride starts near downtown Victoria, at an old trestle
bridge that spans an inlet called the Gorge, and mostly
follows the bed of an old railway line converted some time
ago into a trail, part paved and part gravel. Initially, it
traverses a part of town best described as light-industrial,
intersecting a few side roads here and there but mostly
walled in on either side by the windowless backsides of
auto-repair shops, warehouses, and equipment suppliers of
various sorts.
Technically, that part of the trail is called the "Galloping
Goose". After crossing a bridge over the Trans-Canada
Highway, the trail splits and you can choose to proceed
east, following the highway, or continue north up the
peninsula. North we go, and it is here the Lochside begins.
After passing under a couple of old railway bridges, the
trail skirts the southwest edge of Swan Lake Park, affording
pleasant views of the lake and surrounding hills. One might
almost think one had left the city at this point, if the
trail did not subsequently cross over Quadra street - a busy
urban thoroughfare - taking you right past a dilapidated,
barn-like bottle depot that wouldn't look out of place in
Ravenholm. But not much further along, the landscape becomes
positively rural, as the trail passes through farmlands on
the eastern side of a large hill once more called PKOLS,
after a century or so of being mislabelled "Mount Douglas."
At a certain point along the trail, you can see rising above
the hedgerows the head of the Sphinx ... well, a Sphinx
anyhow, rather shabby, which if more closely inspected would
reveal itself to have been constructed of plywood and
cement. It's part of a local attraction that includes mini
train rides, a truly creepy haunted village, and in the
autumn a corn maze in which my son and I got briefly lost
one time, back when he was much younger and such things
still held an appeal for him.
The rural landscape gives way, for a time, to the suburban,
as one traverses a rather upscale neighbourhood with nice
ocean views, before reconnecting with the trail out where
the farmland truly begins, the Agricultural Land Reserve.
Flies and a certain pungent aroma are reminders to cyclists
that the woodsy path must at times be shared with folks on
horseback. Further along you cross farmers' fields, and pass
a couple of notable landmarks - a smelly mudpit where
wallows a giant hog, and an airport for model airplanes,
where many a time I have paused briefly to watch the planes
take off and land [1}. No planes yesterday though, so onward
to Michell's Farm, a market with a food truck out back,
where I purchased a soda and a toasted ham, bacon and cheese
sandwich, the cholesterol special, that probably took 2
weeks off my life expectancy but in a good way.
I had not yet reached my ultimate destination, but I was
getting close. Just a little ways further up Lochside Drive,
about 20km from where I started, I arrived at Heritage
Acres, a volunteer-run open air museum where castoff
artifacts of yesteryear have been accumulating since
1967. The collection is heavily oriented toward technologies
of various sorts: farm machinery, trains, cars and trucks,
printing presses, medical equipment, radios, an old
switchboard from the Empress Hotel, with huge clumps of wire
hanging off the back ... They even have a couple of old
computers languishing in a display cabinet in a back room,
next to the cleaning supplies - nothing too special, but
still nice to see a C64, TRS-80, and Apple IIc. There are
several buildings on the grounds such as an old school
house, a garage, chapel and so on, but most of the
collection is housed in a big metal warehouse. In front are
themed displays: print shop, dentists office, police
station, bank ... and though I appreciate them all, I
maintain a special fondness for the back of the building,
where old boilers, traction engines, and other machines and
parts thereof sit stacked on pallets, unorganized,
mysterious and inert. It's the smell I think, a combination
of machine oil and the warm spring air blowing in through
the wide open door, that transports me back 40 years and
more, to summers spent schlepping equally mysterious
industrial equipment around an old warehouse.
The Lochside Trail does not end at Heritage Acres, of
course. One could, if one wished, carry on up the peninsula
past the town of Sidney all the way to the ferry terminal.
That's quite a ways further however and though I have done
it in the past, it seemed to me I'd gone quite far enough
for one day, particularly given the return journey, perhaps
not surprisingly, would also be 20km back to the city, and
40 years back to the present. Funny how the trip back always
seems shorter than the trip out.
References
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[1] Victoria Radio Control Modelers Society
https://www.vrcms.org/
[2] Heritage Acres
https://heritageacresbc.ca/
Sat May 3 17:22:07 PDT 2025
