Victoria

At the end of July, I took Andy up to charming Victoria, on Vancouver Island, B.C. We were unable to catch a ferry since I worked that Friday and the last ferry left too early, so we flew, which was highly amusing as the flight was roughly 30 minutes. The flight attendant offered us apple juice cups and you had until she was done passing them out to gulp your juice before she came back to collect them!

We arrived safe and snug and stayed in a nice hotel right near the waterfront. We caught a picture of the parliament building at night, and then went to sleep for a busy Saturday of sightseeing. The next morning, we saw the parliament building in daylight.

We headed to the Royal British Columbia Museum, which is fantastic! We saw totem poles, 19th Century Victoria, and a mastadon!

Behind the museum is an original log cabin and one room school house, and we couldn’t resist a few silly pictures. My view from the teacher’s desk:

 

Andy’s view from the student desks:

We continued along the beautiful harbor, past the parliament building (which has a rare statue of a young queen Victoria in front) to the wax museum. While it is not anywhere close to the size and fun of London’s (Marie, there was no Justin Timberlake to bring sexy wax!), we still enjoyed the campiness of it all. We snapped a picture of wax Martin Luther for Chris:

We walked a looong way back past our hotel to have greasy fish ‘n chips near the big shopping district, did some fun shopping (I loaded up on tea!), and stopped in Victoria’s Chinatown because I wanted to see what it was all about. Here is the view of the Gates of Harmonious Interest:

Besides the lovely parliament building on the harbor, the famous Empress Hotel is there as well. Here it is in daylight and at night:

We had dinner at a restaurant with a nice turn of the century feel, and I was enamored with their lamps!

We had a FULL day of walking, sightseeing, and eating greasy British food, so we went to bed dreaming of salads. Sunday we had most of the day to play before our 5 pm flight, so we skipped the less than stellar hotel breakfast and stopped at a french bakery across the street (MUCH better!). We hiked to Beacon Hill Park, which was gorgeous and quite large. It is a great city park, with playing fields, forests, playgrounds, ponds, a bandstand, and a petting zoo. There was a band playing swing music and a packed crowd enjoying the Sunday afternoon and it was delightful!

One of my favorite sights! Duck butt!

Andy and I love zoos, so we had fun at the petting zoo:

Instructing Andy on the finer points of pygmy goats:

We ended our trip with afternoon tea at the Empress Hotel (dress code required!). The hotel is gorgeous and makes me feel like I am either on the Titanic or in the board game Clue. Here we are about to enjoy a lovely, relaxing, yummy tea with perfect ambiance:

Andy post-tea:

It was all we could do to wake up enough to head to the airport! We had a wonderfully relaxing and fun weekend, on one of the few sunny weekends we had this summer in Northwest!