Trip to Victoria, BC

To celebrate our 1 year anniversary, Anya and I took a weekend trip to Victoria, British Columbia this past weekend. View the photos here.

To get there we took the Victoria Clipper, a high speed passenger ferry (it goes about 35 mph, which seems pretty fast for a boat its size) that makes the trip from Seattle in about 2.5 hours. Overall the ferry experience is rather like an airplane trip; you check your bags, get a boarding pass, go to the gate, take your seat on the boat, wait, collect your bags, and go through customs - it's Canada, after all. The seats and food were only marginally better than most airplanes, but the views were great (assuming it's a clear day you get spectacular views of the Olympic mountains for most of the trip).

The hype for Victoria is that it's a quaint European or British-style town with cute streets and lots of small cafes, pubs, restaurants, and shops. To the extent that it's supposed to be a good tourist destination, we found it to be somewhat overrated. Although the downtown area is compact enough to walk everywhere, it's too big to be called cute and too rundown to be called quaint. Boring 60's and 70's government buildings (it is the capital city of BC) abound everywhere except for the area immediately around the harbour. Because of the temperate climate compared to most of Canada, Victoria is somewhat of a retirement hotspot. This has lead to the construction of glass & steel condo towers which, while quite fitting for Seattle or Vancouver, seem looming and out of place.

Perhaps I am making it out to be worse than it was; we stayed at a good hotel and ate at some wonderful restaurants. Overall, it was a very good Anniversary weekend! It's just that the city did not impress us. The two highlights of Victoria itself are the British Columbia Parliament building, and the 1908 vintage castle-like Fairmont Empress Hotel. (See the pics).

The definite highlight of the trip was the second day, when we took a bus 15 miles outside the city to the Butchart Gardens (again, check out the pictures...link is above). Several generations of the Butchart family have spent 100+ years converting an old limestone quarry into fantastic rolling gardens. It's hard to describe, and harder to come up with a comparison...the best I can do is "Disneyland for botanists and landscape architects." There are many different sections; a Japanese garden, an Italian garden, a rose garden, and the signature "Sunken Garden" where a giant cleft in the ground (the result of the quarrying) was filled with hills of flowers, a pond, lawns, moss-covered rocks, and walking paths. The cold weather and rain didn't really dampen the experience, in a lot of ways it seemed appropriate to the climate and made everything feel very fresh and alive.

As I said before, it was a good weekend getaway; the splendor of the gardens made it worthwhile. However, I don't think Anya and I will be in any rush to go back to Victoria, especially with so many other good destinations near Seattle. We're already planning a trip to Portland sometime later in the summer, which is a city that is quite different from Victoria and drastically under-rated as a weekend getaway. Until then, we have a countless number of places to explore and things to do here in Seattle.