Victoria Posted July 2, 2006 at 10:39 pm

Vacation is now over and it’s back to work on Monday. Our last stop was Victoria, the capitol of British Columbia located on Vancouver Island. Victoria is smaller than Vancouver, though it is reputed to be equally beautiful. We spent a single day in the city, which proved too little time to do everything that we had planned.

There are no land routes connecting Victoria to the mainland, so we had to take a ferry from Vancouver. The 1.5 hour boat ride was relatively scenic with land near enough at hand to keep things interesting. A state-sponsored naturalist was also on board who gave informative talks during the passage. All told, it was a much more comfortable experience than your typical plane ride.

On the island, proper, we headed for the famous Butchart Gardens. The gardens were impressive enough, with gobs of botanical variety and some interesting themed sections like a Japanese garden. We also tried to tour the island in our rental car by a supposedly scenic route, but we were quickly disappointed by a monotonous ride through heavily wooded residential areas. Dinner at a local hole-in-the-wall Italian restaurant called Julia’s Place and a stroll through downtown rounded out our whirlwind tour.

In retrospect, I think a day wasn’t really enough to see most of what Victoria had to offer. We had a number of other activities planned, but simply ran out of time to do them all. This wasn’t as much of a problem in Seattle and Vancouver where took several days to do everything.

Pictures are up in the gallery. Use the link below.