mindless ramblings

Our plan for the first day was to catch the 9am ferry from Tsawassen to Swartz Bay. We almost missed it thanks to waking up late, but we made it with around 30 mins to spare (and got some McDonald’s breakfast along the way too).

Despite the generally dismal weather that is so common in the Pacific Northwest at this time of year, it was nice and sunny during the ferry ride. It turns out that the ferry that we took both ways (Spirit of Vancouver Island) is due for a renovation and will be out of service for a couple of months starting next week. Didn’t look all that old to me, although the coffee that I had onboard was disgusting!

Threading our way through the islands.

A quick glimpse of another ferry going the other way.

It’s actually quite cold!

When we got off the ferry, we were still around 4 hours away from being able to check in at our hotel, so we decided to drive over to Victoria’s Inner Harbour and walk around. We wanted to visit the parliament buildings first, but they were closed as it was a holiday. As a result, we went over to the Royal London Wax Museum.

I don’t think the wax museum was as good as the Madame Tussauds wax museums I have been to, but it’s still quite good, especially as it has wax figures of famous Canadians too.

Happy!

After finishing the wax museum, we headed next door to the Pacific Undersea Gardens. Unfortunately, this was pretty boring for me. The water was murky and the viewing windows small… not a good combination. As the next show at the Underwater Theatre was almost an hour away, we decided to leave and grab lunch before returning, as we had run out of things to see in there.

We had lunch at The Bay Centre as we couldn’t really find anything else to eat. We wanted to grab some fish and chips initally, but we couldn’t find one that was open with easy parking. So we ended up walking around downtown before deciding to just screw it and eat at the food court.

Empress Hotel

After lunch, we went to check in at the hotel. Having done that and dropped all of our stuff off, we returned to the Pacific Undersea Gardens. The show was better than the exhibits itself, with a diver explaining stuff to the audience, as well as coaxing an octopus to come out and play! The overall experience was too short, I’d save my money next time and visit something else.

With that completed, the sun was setting and we headed back to the hotel to take a quick nap before dinner. We had no idea where to go for dinner, so we went to the Greek restaurant next door. I had a Greek meatball dish, which tasted like spaghetti and meatballs without the spaghetti while Esther had some delicious Tiger prawns with rice.

The rest of the night was spent playing Cranium, which was really really fun as always. Finally went to sleep at around 2am; the plan was to wake up at 9am and try to catch the Parliament tour at 10am or 11am, but we decided to just sleep in at the last minute. Turns out that was a pretty good move!

Stay tuned for Day 2!