Our first visit to Yellow Point Lodge: “camp for adults”
Wife and I did a late summer trip, our first stay at Yellow Point Lodge, a fascinating and famous camp/resort on Vancouver Island, just south of Nanaimo. Slogan: “Eat. Read. Sleep.” (But we did the eat, read, exercise version: hiking, kayaking, swimming, tennis!)
I recently blogged about their 6-kilometre scale model of the solar system.
It’s hard to get YPL bookings, and we got quite lucky with good ones (we were told again and again by friendly old-timers). They have a novel registration system: you get to come back on the same days each year, indefinitely if you want, and people do that for literally decades. We met several people who’d been regulars since the 80s and 90s. It’s almost a century old!
A beautiful natural seaside setting, surrounded by coastal forest, is officially the main attraction. But plentiful healthy food might be the single best thing about the place.
And it’s not particularly expensive.
It is quirky and odd! No kids, no locks, no gadgets. You mostly eat in groups at big tables, and everyone was extremely friendly. The owner made a speech on Saturday night and people cheered, threw paper airplanes made from their placemats, and bellowed the slogan: “If you don’t eat your vegetables, you don’t get dessert!”
“Have we joined a cult?” I asked my tablemates. “Don’t worry,” I was told when the laughter died down, “it’s just camp for adults.”
“What’s with the paper airplanes?” we asked one of the very casually dressed servers in the dining room, and he gave us a highlight from our stay: dude rolled his eyes, and declared, “Hell if I know, but they do it every Saturday night!” He actually seemed disgusted! (And charmingly free to express himself.)
Nothing’s perfect
- For me? A bit too social for an introvert. 😱
- Even if I was an extrovert, it’s a bit of an awkward social fit for me. The average age of guests is very high, and there’s plenty of privilege and entitlement on display, and especially a lot of old hippies who wanted to share their love for alternative medicine and snake oil.
- The dining room is thunderously loud — and really doesn’t need to be, there are solutions to that.
- I truly could have used more places to hang wet clothes and towels.
- Also, there were not enough places to sit outside with shelter from sun/rain. (I diligently honoured the spirit of their “no laptops in the lounge” rule — I don’t like it, but I get it. And yet I truly felt like a second-class citizen at 8am on Sunday, looking for some other comfy place to sit and write, forlornly seeking a place to sit outside … in the rain … and finding none! Because they really just don’t have good covered outside seating, which struck me as the single biggest glitch in their whole vibe. Why aren’t there at least three nice gazebos on that huge property?!)
But it’s mostly a lovely place with a ton of nice ways to be both active and restful, while eating like a (fit) king, and I would go back for the food alone. And go back we will! Because somehow we got premium “rebookable” bookings, the Holy Grail of Yellow Point Lodge. 🤷🏻♂️ Cool.
More photos!
As always, I’d like to share more photos of us, but I must respect my wife’s wish to be an offline lady.
