Ketchikan, Alaska to Victoria, British Columbia : August 1, Day 26

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What's hot: Deep relaxation

What's not: Long day at sea

Travel lesson of the day: We live in a t-shirt nation.

from Kathy:

From a Ketchikan departure at noon on July 31 until noon on August 1, we traveled 470 miles at a speed of more than 20 knots. Nonetheless, we were still hours away from our last port visit in Victoria, British Columbia. The mood on the ship changed from laid-back to last-day—people lining up to review their bills, the high-priced art show was packed away. The kids slept until 1 p.m. Paul confessed he was bored.

I would have been bored, too, but for the amount of time I spent blogging. I am grateful for the good feedback--I'm certain that the writing made me pay more attention than I would have otherwise.

The writing also kept me from dwelling on the the fact that it was 7 p.m before we made our four-hour stop at Victoria, British Columbia, the last stop of the cruise. By the time we got there, we were more than 24 hours underway.

Victoria, I read somewhere, has been named one of the world’s ten most beautiful cities. True enough, if you stick to the waterfront district around the parliament building. Victoria is like a giant British botanical park combined with the standard tourist main street of t-shirt shops and brand-name outlets. Ice cream cones are as much as $7CN.

The four of us walk until we realize that in four hours, there is nothing we can discover that we haven’t already seen along the way. The same t-shirts we saw in Juneau, Skagway, and Ketchikan, are here—just displaying new words: Victoria, British Columbia. We have become a t-shirt nation, I do believe.

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Photos

Not a Bad Palace
The King of Floonia eyes some new real estate: Parliament, British Columbia.

Victoria: Parliament at Night
Are they using solar power to run these lights!?