Canada Days 6, 7, & 8

Day 6 – Took the 4.5-hour train ride from Courtenay to Victoria starting at 1:00pm. Along the way, a car almost hit us because the train was going on unmarked at-grade crossings! Sometimes there would only be an “X” meaning railroad crossing with nothing else. No lights, gates, bells, or even a stop sign! For a while, we were the only two people on the train. Chris wondered how they even made any money on this train. When we got to Victoria, we checked into our hotel and went to go look for something to eat. We ended up going to Café Mexico. That restaurant happened to be Victoria’s longest running Mexican restaurant. Chris was pissed off that they didn’t have free chips & salsa as an appetizer and he went on a tirade about this for about ten minutes. Anyways, we ordered and the food was surprisingly good for not seeing one Mexican person in Victoria at all. Later, in all the dining guides that we picked up suggested that you try the fresh chips and salsa. It must have been so good at Café Mexico that they could charge. I ordered a chimichanga and Chris ordered a burrito. Included on the plate were two chips that were the best chips ever. After eating dinner, we went to the liquor store to buy some beer. Chris of course, got something with 8.0% alcohol and we split a six-pack of Labatt Blue’s. We decided to go to Plan B that night and got there at around 10:30pm. I don’t think Victoria had a later last-call time than Vancouver (3:00am). I think it was just 2:00am. Anyways, we were there for quite some time. Unfortunately it was Saturday night and the place was full of kids (19 year-olds) and the DJ was playing really really bad music. It was as if he couldn’t do any beat mixing. I could have done a better job! I went home and went to sleep to get ready for the next day.

Day 7 – More of Victoria. We woke up early in order to get some breakfast. We ended up going to John’s Place which is sort of like Omelette Express. The food was good but the server would never come to us. We must have waited at least ten minutes just to get the check. After breakfast, we took the autobus out to Craigdarroch Castle. Admission was cheap for students and they even had this cool mechanical shoe cleaner. Inside the castle were the most extravagant things I’ve ever seen. Each room was hardwood with rugs and it was just so awesome to look at the stuff like the Breakfast Room or the Smoking room. It had about 26,000 square-feet! That is huge! After the castle, we headed back into town to prepare for The Butchart Gardens. During Christmas time, they light up the place with thousands of Christmas lights. We got there early so we could take the tour during the day and then again when they turned all the lights on. There was a cool theme, The Twelve Days of Christmas and each of the twelve items could be found in different parts of the park. The lights were truly a sight to see. We decided to eat dinner that night at the Irish Times pub down by the wharf. It was really nice inside and the Irish food was spectacular. After dinner, we walked around the waterfront and went to sleep early because legislature tours were supposed to start at 8:30am the next morning, or at least that’s what the guard said.

Day 8 – Woke up early to go to the legislature buildings tour. We get there at exactly 8:30am only to find that the tour doesn’t even start until 9:30am. The decision was made to do the self-guided tour. After about 20 minutes, everything started to get boring as almost every door was locked and there was no session going on with the legislature. We did get a picture of where they sat and that’s about it. We left and didn’t even come back to do the tour because the only cool part of the building was the outside. We walked to Floyd’s Diner, when is a very cool place to eat. Everybody inside there was cool and there were even these two old guys talking to us. Chris was wearing a “So-Cal Triathlon” shirt and one of the old guys thought that Chris was actually from so-cal. “He didn’t even buy that shirt from around here. He’s actually from so-cal,” is what he said. The reality is that Chris just bought that shirt from Aéropostale. We tried HP Sauce and it was just like an A1 sauce since it was offered to us at every restaurant we went to and got back to the hotel to leave for the bus to take us to the ferry. The bus ride to the ferry terminal was a double-decker. We sat on the very top and the driver was dangerous; constantly missing the limit-line at intersections, not stopping fully at stop signs, hitting tree branches, and almost hitting a power pole and a street light. The ride was good except there was this girl with the most annoying laugh in the world sitting behind us and laughing almost the whole way to the ferry. While waiting to get on the ferry to Vancouver, there were all these annoying babies crying for what seemed like forever. When we got on the ferry, the crying continued… There were many babies on that ferry and they were all making noise for the entire trip. The bus ride to the airport was un-eventful and so was the flight back to San Francisco. We had visited three major cities in less than 12-hours that day.

All images will soon be posted in the gallery.