Jeanine and I are up at the crack of dawn to ensure we catch the 7:30am ferry from Vancouver to Vancouver Island where Victoria, the provincial capital of British Columbia, is located. The ferry is an essential mode of transportation in this neck of the woods where all things interesting seem to be separated by large bodies of water. I enjoy spending time on the deck while Jeanine reads a novel comfortably ensconced in the passenger lounge.
Our initial destination this morning is Butchart Gardens. Created by Jennie Butchart, wife of a Portland cement magnate who transformed an exhausted limestone quarry into a magnificent sunken garden which was completed in 1921. They named their home “Benvenuto” (“welcome” in Italian), and began to receive visitors to their gardens. In 1926, they replaced their tennis courts with an Italian garden and in 1929 they replaced their kitchen vegetable garden with a large rose garden. The gardens now attract more than a million visitors each year and it is easy to understand why. My favorite section was the Japanese style garden which was authentic in every way albeit difficult to photograph.
We lunched at the gardens before completing our journey to Victoria where we walked around a bit before taking a Hippo tour (very similar to Boston’s amphibious Duck Boat tours).
Victoria is ideally suited to an amphibious tour with the most prominent architecture facing the bay including the British Columbia Legislature Building and the Empress Hotel. The Edwardian, château-style hotel was designed by Francis Rattenbury for Canadian Pacific Hotels as a terminus hotel for Canadian Pacific’s steamship line, whose main terminal was just a block away. The hotel was to serve business people and visitors to Victoria, but later as Canadian Pacific ceased its passenger services to the city, the hotel was successfully remarketed as a resort to tourists in the mid-to-late 1920s.
Quite hungry by the end of our tour we enjoyed dinner at the famous Bard and Banker Scottish pub. Opened in 1862 as the Bank of British Columbia, the building remained a bank until 1988 under an array of different banking establishments’ control. Of all the bank employees to work at this location in the 126 years it was a bank, the most notable was the bard of the Yukon, Robert Service. These two elements of history led to the moniker for the pub. After parking our car in the standby line for tomorrow morning’s ferry, we made a final walking tour of the city as the sun set. Pictured here is one extremely relaxed and happy wife.
