Victoria (not that one)

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Sunday Nov 30

We were up at 5.20 after a very late night playing Rock Band on the PS2. Why on earth did we stay up so late? Aunt Dorothy drove us to the docks where we boarded the Victoria Clipper for a journey through beautiful Puget Sound to the city of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. At least we're told Puget Sound is beautiful. The fog was so dense we couldn't see a thing.

There were two main things we wanted to do in Victoria, visit the Butchart Gardens and have high tea at the Empress Hotel. We started with the gardens. We had been told many times that we had to see these gardens, mostly by people who had been there in summer when the gardens are filled with flowers. At the end of November there were very few flowers at all. But there were also very few people; we almost had the whole place to ourselves.

The everpresent fog hung over us, giving us an eerie sense of isolation. Even without flowers the gardens were beautiful. We spent a couple of hours there, slowly making our way around, enjoying not only the gardens but also the Christmas decorations.

We hadn't had time for lunch, so when we sat down to high tea at the Empress at 3.45 we were starving. Which was good, because they gave us a lot of food. Three 'courses' - sandwiches, scones and desserts. We could barely move afterwards we were so full. And we even drank tea. We aren't tea drinkers, but Nancy managed to get through a couple of cups of the special Empress house blend. I chose orange and pineapple tea, which was more like hot watered-down fruit juice.

In the evening we wandered around the streets, not so much to look at anything, since Victoria is a very sleepy place on a Sunday evening, but to get a little exercise at least after our enormous afternoon tea.

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