As we knew a lot of people were likely to be at the popular indoor places around Vancouver we decided to go on a road trip and head out to somewhere a bit quieter. We settled on going to Chilliwack which is 100km east of where we live. It's a simple route to get there, you go along highway 1 for the majority of the drive and it only takes about an hour and 15 minutes. We didn't really have any motive for going, it was just a place we'd heard of that seemed a fair distance away from anywhere else we'd been too! The drive over was good especially for the latter part of it, as soon as we'd gone past Abbotsford (about half the way) we were driving alongside the mountains which looked really cool when we were closer. 

When we finally got to Chilliwack we noticed the place was really quiet, there wasn't many people around at all and a lot of the shops were closed, oops! It was then we thought to ourselves maybe we should have done a little bit of research about the place beforehand. Lou found a second hand book store which may sound pretty lame to most people but to a book lover it was, in Lou's words, "Paperback Heaven"! Lou got 3 books for $11 and then we continued to walk around for another 45 minutes but we didn't see a great deal we could do on the day.  Chilliwack (we now know) is really a smallish (80,000 people) rural town and the main things it offers we weren't prepared for! It looks like a great place to go to if you want to go biking, hiking or fishing so we'll have to remember this place when we have the equipment to do any of those activities. 

We'd brought with us some food for a picnic so instead of sitting in a car park we decided we'd go for something a bit more scenic for our late lunch. We headed down to Cultus Lake which was about 12km south from where we were (and a pleasant drive to get there). We were surprised when we got there to find there were only about 10 other cars parked up, though it had started to get cooler and the clouds were getting darker. We found a nice picnic bench next to the lake to have our lunch and then we had a leisurely walk around the place. Our friend Sam had mentioned to us it is a great place to go to when it's hot weather, I can definitely see why. You can swim in the lake which is very clear and full of fish, it will be awesome to go back there one day to do that. Lou loves the property surrounding the lake, there really are some nice looking homes but I think we need to start playing the local lotto before we can even dream of living there!  We'd probably go as far as saying that in terms of natural beauty this was the nicest place we have been to so far. 

 [EDIT : I've since looked up prices and apparently in the early 2000's you could get property for around $200k but now the average price is around $325k,  however this still sounds great to me considering how nice the place is]