Victoria is a city on Vancouver Island which is pretty big, if you look on a map, it is right at the southern tip of the island.
I went with Marianne and Sarah, Sarah being in charge of transport received a 9/10 for the trip, I was in charge of accomodation and received 4/10, the same score as Marianne who was controlling food. As you can see, we had great transport, but awful accomodation and food.
After deftly directing us through a series of buses, Sarah got us to the ferry on time, an exciting achievement for the start of our weekend. The ferry ride is about an hour and a half and you actually travel through US waters (very exciting for Marianne, returning to her home country for a bit), and you wind through all these tiny little gulf islands. It is spectacular - there were little wooden houses surrounded by Canadian bush, as you can imagine I went camera mad, and ran around the boat in my toque (beanie, I just love the Canadian word!), scarf and gloves as it was chilly.
Another bus ride and we were in Victoria proper. The countryside getting to the city, again, beautiful - this country is almost too beautiful for it's own good I tell you. Victoria is a fairly old city (well, it's over 100, to me that's old), and has the most spectacular parliament buildings, especially lit up at night. The harbour is in the centre of town, so all Saturday night we walked around the harbour, it's just spectacular. We also discovered trashy tourist shops open til late so I could appease my delight for collecting terrible souvenirs. Perhaps the highlight of the evening though was playing blackjack, gambling for chocolate.
Why this late outing on our first night? Okay, perhaps I didn't lead up to that question but that's what I want you to be asking yourself, because there was indeed a reason. My fault, the hostel we stayed at. It is called the Turtle Rest and is the most horrible place I have ever stayed in in my life. It was packed and smelt bad - we had a fighting couple, several drugged up people and some funny smelling strange looking men in our room, plus two of us had to sleep on mattresses on the floor. Yes, I miserably failed in gaining us descent accomodation - I only received 4/10 because I knew exactly where the place was and had gone to the effort of discovering that they had blankets on the beds beforehand.
After an interesting night, we hung out with ducks and scary Canadian geese the next day (Canadian geese are grey and black, but just as scary), and gorged ourselves on the rest of the gambling chocolate (the reason Marianne got a low score on food, too much chocolate so we all felt sick).
If I have painted a less that gorgeous picture of Victoria I didn't mean to, it really is a beautiful city and is very friendly. We had a lovely break and managed to return home in time for Thanksgiving dinner in the caf, yay! I had turkey and cranberry sauce and pumpkin pie (which is a desert, it's sweet!), all very very good.
I shall have photos soon, I promise!
toodaloo
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