Day out in Victoria

This weekend it was suggested to spend some time in Victoria and do a bit of local touristing. It’s a pretty close destination and therefore I didn’t think through the planning so much. I should have.

A bit of a preface: to get to Victoria it’s about a half an hour drive from Vancouver to Tsawwassen (/teh’wa:sehn/, /seh’wa:sehn/ or /tseh’wa:sen/) then an hour and 30 minute ferry ride to Swartz Bay, then another half hour drive to get to Downtown Victoria. Totalling to approximately 2 and a half hours of travel. Wrong.

The day before we left I attempted to reserve a spot on the 10am ferry so we wouldn’t have to worry about any waits. This didn’t work because the ferry reservation site was down–of course. I figured it shouldn’t be too busy getting to Victoria on a Sunday since it’s usually the day everyone comes back to Vancouver. Turns out I was right… but that only helped half of my cause (since we had to take a ferry back to Vancouver later that night).

Jumping ahead about 3 hours, we found ourselves in the middle of downtown Victoria. It had an old town feel, with city parking. No damn parking anywhere! For about half an hour we were trying to find street parking, and finally gave up and proceeded to search for underground pay parking. The first parkade we found was a diamond in the rough… free parking on Sundays! After settling in, we began the day…

We went to eat at the first cafe we saw and hot damn it was good. Ham and cheese omelette for me, veggie omelette for her. When eating under the hot sun, I do not recommend eating cheese. Take that advice with you and learn from my mistakes. After breakfast we walked around for a bit. There was a marketplace which was like Richmond nightmarket minus all the asian people, the horrific stage performers and food. Pretty bland if you ask me. From there we went around and took some pictures of the dragonboat festival, the parliament building and the Fairmont hotel.

After a short debate, we went to the museum. I haven’t been to a museum in about 20 years and I don’t know why. It was amazing! To stand in the presence of artifacts dating several millennia ago set me aback. These were all from the British Museum’s “Treasures” exhibit, featured in the Royal BC Museum. I think my favorite pieces were from ancient Egypt and ancient Rome. To see these artifacts so close and personal was an experience to me. I never thought I’d enjoy a visit to the museum so much. Easily on the top of my list for this visit.

We then did a bit of walking around, ran into some street performers and I found myself a replacement 4x4x4 Rubik’s cube (Rubik’s Revenge). The last one was demolished by my mom. I’ve never seen anything explode in someone’s hands like that before..

Finally it was time to make our last runs and stopped by the winery. This was a first for me and I had the biggest urge to just run through the grape field. No reasoning at all… I just want to do it. If I had to be somewhere fast, I would imagine myself surrounded by grapes.

Anyways…

The trip home wasn’t very awesome. Like I said above, “I figured it shouldn’t be too busy getting to Victoria on a Sunday since it’s usually the day everyone comes back to Vancouver.” We waited in the car for about an hour before we got to the actual toll to pay for the ride back home. From there we waited in line for about another two hours waiting for our ferry. Two hours later, we made it into Vancouver.

Putting this all together, there was about 8 and a half hours of transit in this day trip. We spent less time being tourists than we did traveling. How sick is that? But in the end, I thought it was a nice trip out of the city and I got to enjoy a beautiful view on the ride back.