Victoria

We left Whistler (which we loved) and headed down the hills towards Vancouver. We decided not to hook up the truck for the drive down to sea level based on our previous trip. We were probably being over cautious, but better safe than sorry. Beautiful landscapes along the way, especially when we got near the Howe Sound:

We drove through Vancouver to board a ferry to Vancouver Island and the town of Victoria. So much fun taking a ferry when you weigh 24 tons and are 67 feet long.

However, this ferry could easily accommodate us. Pretty pictures along the way:

Once we exited the ferry, we headed to our campground, Salish Seaside RV Resort and Marina. What a find!

Thank you Steve and Laurie Chubb for the recommendation!

In the marina were floating houses:

We learned that they sell for anywhere between $680,000 to $1.3M CAD – crazy!

Didn’t do anything exciting for the rest of the day. Some times down times are the best times (that’s a lot of times).

What a day! We visited the Butchart Gardens

(which was the major reason why we wanted to come to Victoria) it was amazing. Butchart Gardens covers 55 acres, it is privately held, it has been a visitor destination for 120 years, became a National Historic Site of Canada in 2004, about one million people visit every year, and it was once the home of Jennie and Robert Butchart who started the gardens. The Butchart’s ran the Portland Cement business and their site was a worked-out limestone quarry. Jennie’s vision was to beautify the quarry near their home and with their extensive world travels wanted to recreate some of the awe inspiring gardens they had seen around the world. Here are the five distant gardens that Jennie started (imagine starting something like this but not being able to see the fruits of your labor for decades to come):

Sunken Garden:

Rose Garden:

Japanese Garden:

Italian Garden:

The Mediterranean Gardens were a bit disappointing after seeing the beauty of the other gardens. I think that they used part of this garden for the parking lot.

Check out this crazy tree:

And this redwood Suquoia:

Our favorite was the Sunken Gardens! Absolutely breathtaking! Highly recommend spending some time here.

Afterwards we decided to drive to downtown Victoria and visit the Fairmont Empress. I mean why not? We have seen four other ones so we stopped in for a drink:

Then we drove over to Market Square to have an early dinner at Ferris because it was happy hour and oysters were $1.50 each. Such a deal!

Spent the remainder of the day back at the Busse Bus.

The following day we took the water taxi back into Victoria.

We started the day by visiting Chinatown:

Amid Chinatown there are multiple alleys connecting the streets, Fan Tan Alley is the most famous:

Loved this picture:

Since it was lunchtime we went to Nubo Japanese Tapas Restaurant because the person at our campground recommended it.

Great place with excellent food!

From there we headed into the Market Square for some shopping:

I was able to find a summer suit that I need for a wedding next month and Katrina found a beautiful dress.

We stopped for a drink at Cafe Mexico. Excellent spicy tequila!

Then we strolled through Bastion Square and looked at craft tents where artists were hawking their goods.

We called the water taxi to get back to the Salish Seaside RV Resort. On the way back we learned that the Victoria Harbor also acts as landing strips for the very busy seaplanes from Harbor Air. It as fun watching them land and takeoff as we transversed along the coastline.

We spent the rest of the evening relaxing in the coach.

We needed to swap sites the following day to one on the water. Bear enjoyed watching the two sea otters right out front:

Because of the shortened day we didn’t get out until dinner planned at Finn’s. Again we took the water taxi

over to the downtown area. Our new site was on the water so we got this picture from the taxi:

We also had to wait to cross the channel as the Coho Ferry was pulling out of port.

This is the same ferry that we would be utilizing the next day as we ferry over to Port Angeles, WA.

We stopped for a drink at The Local:

I ordered the Dungeness crab for dinner:

So yummy!

We took the ferry back and used up the rest of our Canadian cash.

The following day we checked out of Salish Seaside at 11:00am and needed to find somewhere to house the Busse Bus until our scheduled ferry departure at 7:30pm.

We had thought that we would be parking in a big store parking lot, but on the way there we espied this parking lot:

Pulled in for about five hours which was nice because we had a nice lunch,

we were able to take Bear on a long walk on the path,

and we got caught up on some paperwork (blog). Time to get rolling to the Black Ball Ferry, through border control, and back into the US of A. Wish us luck!