Visiting the island

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We took a trip to vancouver island on monday to see Victoria and visit my mums cousin Gordon and his family in Sooke. We caught the bus to the tswwassen ferry terminal and the ferry to swartz bay, then another bus to victoria. Gordon picked us up off the bus and drove us out to their house where we were introduced to their neighbours and their llamas, all of whom were very nice! we had planned to head back to victoria, where we had already checked into a hostel, however the evening was so much fun that when Rose, Gordon's wife, presented us with toothbrushes after 7 bottles of wine, as a welcome to Sooke present, we took them up on their offer to stay the night in their lovely house and polish off another 3 with the copious help of Jess, Gordon's daughter, and Dave & Kelly, the aforementioned neighbours. The highlight of the evening for me was hitting the hot tub with Jess at about 2am with a mug of wine!! (jess's idea!!) Feeling slightly non-shiney the day after we called dave and kelly and we all went for breakfast at the local diner, however only dave and myself could face food! more drama was to occur however when dave and kelly drove us back to victoria in their jeep. pauls wallet fell out of his pocket and apart from cashing in the 'emergency' travellers cheques we had no available cash. so, we called gordon who very kindly dropped by the hostel in his gravel 'truck' to loan us some cash and help us get hold of dave and kelly. unfortunately they had made it back to sooke (about 45mins away) so gordon offered to bring it in later when he finished work, emergency averted phew!!! for his troubles and also to attempt to refill his wine rack we found a nice local wine shop to get a thank you gift!
So after all this we still managed to see some of victoria, the capital of british colombia, its quite a small city but its very nice and scenic. you can go on whale watching tours but its quite pricey and the weather was a bit too cold meaning it was quite unlikely we would even see any whales so we decided against it.
we did go to the underwater gardens - a glass bottomed boat - where we saw a lot of starfish and an octopus though, the city hall buildings and the market square, then in the evening we wandered down to the parliament buildings which were covered in fairy lights and super tacky looking (ali it was even tackier than the eiffel tower at night!). After our island adventure we headed back to vancouver to get organised for our rocky adventure, however we had one more thing to do. one of jess's friends had spare tickets for the jack johnson concert at UBC in vancouver so paul decided we would go as his final birthday treat. We went with jess and her friends and the concert was great, we all had helium balloons attached to our wrists so we could find each other in the crowd and in the massive food queues but jess's home made ' i love banana pancakes' t-shirt stole the show.

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