Last month (Feb 2-5) Jenn and I went to Victoria and spent the weekend with her family. In case you're not 100% sure where Victoria is, I've grabbed a map for you. The route shown is not how we got there, but it gives you an idea of where Victoria is relative to the Seattle area. As you can see, it's on the southern tip of Vancouver Island in the Canadian province of British Columbia.
On Thursday morning, Jenn and I drove into Seattle and left our car with our good friend Ray. Then he took us down to the ferry. It's about a three hour ride from Seattle to Victoria. The view as we left Seattle was spectacular. I couldn't get a good picture with just a cell phone camera, so you'll have to take my word for it. But I can show you the sun rise over Seattle as we were boarding the boat.
Elaine had to get back to work, so Jenn and I left our bags with her and decided to explore downtown Victoria. Note: I used an ATM to get the cash, and I learned the following: in Canada, they spell check like this: "cheque". And their money is multicolored, not plain green. (For the entire weekend, I was on the lookout for differences between Canada and the US...)
As we started to explore, one thing stood out- it's a gorgeous city. The sun was out and there really wasn't a cloud in the sky. And I couldn't get over how clean everything was. And the architecture is incredible, too. There were interesting churches and nice little houses everywhere I looked.
And Victoria is perfect for anyone who's a little nerdy. For a town with a population of about 80,000, they have way more book stores, hobby shops, and game stores than you'd expect.
We stopped for coffee at a local coffee shop, tried some Tim Bits at Tim Horton's, and shared a giant ice cream sundae.
I don't remember the exact order of events for the entire weekend, but I can give you an overall impression of the things we did.
We watched Nick's basketball game- they won (it wasn't even close). We also played some of my favorite games (this great card game called Dutch Blitz and a word game called Bananagrams). We went to a tropical butterfly sanctuary and toured the Legislative Assembly of British Columbia (fascinating for people like Jenn and I). We also went to Craigdarroch Castle, which was an incredible experience.
If you can't tell already, I really like anything that talks about the history of an area. For example, we also visited the Royal British Columbia Museum, and they had a great collection of exhibits that detailed the history of the area. It was broken into two broad sections- one section discussing the history of the First Nations people in the area, and one section discussing everything from the arrival of Europeans onward. They had all sorts of artifacts and large areas setup representing streets in town, or the deck of a ship. You could walk down the streets of Victoria in the late 1800's or walk on the deck of the HMS Discovery. It really gave you a great feel for the area. Worth every penny!
On Saturday night, Dave took us all to his observatory and we used the 1.2 meter telescope to look at famous galaxies and stars. He also showed us the database astronomers have that contains information on all the objects they've observed. This data is shared so they can build on each other's work. The software that controls the telescope is all written and maintained by staff astronomers. The computers are running a version of Linux- it's all very open source and UNIXy. I was really impressed with the whole thing.
We came back to Seattle on Sunday night. Honestly, it was hard to come back- the sun was out for the entire vacation- we didn't have a single cloudy day. I didn't want the trip to end. Also, I'm convinced it doesn't actually rain in Victoria, so I'm not sure how it's so green up there! :)
Anyway, Jenn and I both had a great time, and we're really hoping we can go back soon. I'd love to see the city in the summer.
We've been to that Milestones a couple times too. I remember having many bellinis there and amassing quite the collection of little plastic animals! Glad to hear you two had fun :)
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