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Published: September 1st 2007
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Thursday, Aug 30, 2007
We awoke at 2:45 am to get ready and leave for Calgary at 3:15 am. We got away by 3:25 and drove at a rate of 120 k/h all the way to Calgary, arriving at the airport parking lot at 5:35. Checking thru was a fast and easy with our pre-printed boarding passes. Rose failed the security scan. She had unintentionally left a small pair of pointed manicure scissors in her purse that were confiscated. Flights were on time and very pleasant. The bigger plane floated into Vancouver in clear skies. The smaller prop-driven plane took 12 minutes to fly over to Victoria. There we caught the air-porter bus to motels downtown and it was driven by Freddie Kruger who we learned graduated from driving pedicabs in the downtown bay area and he was a wealth of local information as we took that 30 minute journey. Interestingly, though his nearest drop to Brian’s was the James Bay Inn, he slipped on by and dropped us right in front of Brian’s at 65 Government Street. ( He got a $5 tip for all his fine services even though I had earlier planned to only give him my
A Pumpkin Flower Tree
A Don Con - naming the tree falsely $1.75 in pocket change.)
Once at Brian’s we found the car and house keys in the secret designated spot under a brick, got ourselves inside his meager but adequate apartment and promptly settled into his Lazy-boy chair and futon couch and napped for 30 minutes. We had brought a precious carry-on bag full 11 cobs of Taber corn, and 5 nice-sized cucumbers and 5 tomatoes from our garden and I got them in the fridge and then we set out for our day’s activities. First we took a walk along the oceanside just 3 blocks south of Brian’s lodgings. There we observed a sporadic stream of joggers and walkers, some with various species of dog companions. One lady, a ‘street-person I suspect, was ‘camped’ with her few blankets and back-pack and a guitar at a picnic table between the mossy pond at the seashore cliff edge and the public trail side washrooms. She was bent over in a yoga position, stretching what were likely sore early-morning muscles and ligaments. We walked about 15 minutes down the upper shore line, then returned passed our interesting lady who was then playing her guitar.
At about 11:00 am we departed in
The Sunken Garden
An amazing array of flowers and trees Brian’s more-fluorescent-green-than-turquoise 2-door Honda Civic coupe for our Butchart Gardens which we had predetermined was a logical visit for this calm and sunny Victoria Day. Brian was hard at work all day. We knew we’d have time to enjoy local sights. But first, we needed lunch. We would just stop and have a bowl of soup at some spot along the way. We ended up at the Elk Lake Café and Water-sport Rental joint. The slender Chinese waitress offered menus but we soon learned she’d run out of the specialty clam chowder which we desired, and we ended up with tomato-beef soup and a toasted egg-salad sandwich along with our glasses of water. The egg-salad sandwich was not what we anticipated. It was a half-scrambled fried egg with a healthy portion of shredded lettuce that was actually quite tasty. But we were a bit hungry cause we waited a long time for the service because there was quite a stream of bathing suit clad youth coming in and out wanting various rental things for use at the lake and apparently no one was tending that booth adjoining the restaurant.
The Butchart Garden experience, thought not greatly anticipated by me,
turned out to be a very good one. We paid our $50 for the two of us to enter, then spent about 3 hours viewing the various gardens with all of the spectacular foliage and flowers. They say over a million visitors attend each year through all the seasons. The site is so well done. Native and foreign plants thrive throughout. Trees provide nice shade on all the walkways. Part of our entry fee included the evening concert at the band shell. We actually left the gardens and went to a nearby restaurant before returning to hear the 17-piece “Monday Night Big Band” and a singer, Joe Coughlin doing a variety of Frank Sinatra numbers in jazz arrangements. Though jazz is not our big thing, these old favorites were done up very well. It was most entertaining. We got back to Brian’s at 10:00 pm and after a very short visit we all headed for bed. It was a long day. Our bodies enjoyed a full night of rest.
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