Island Exploration.

Mom, Stan, and I took our guests to see Victoria over the weekend and it was absolutely wonderful. It all started with a chance sailing on board the new Coastal Celebration ferry to which I was observing it's voyage from it's birthplace in Germany, over along the Thames in London, and through the Panama Canal, and finally arriving to its destination in Vancouver. Just two months after its first official service operation, we were sailing on it, leaving the foggy Tsawwassen terminal behind and heading for the sun at Swartz Bay.

After driving off the ferry, we decided to take the scenic route along Lands End Rd., then along West Sanich Rd., following the coastline for a spectacular view of the Pacific. Along the way, we stopped by a roadside fruit and vegetable store.

As the sun went down, it cast a nice afterglow just above the horizon. Wanting to catch this spectacular view, Stan, Uncle Igarashi, and I went up to the observatory for a splendiferous view of the environment. I was able to catch some beautiful nightscapes on my DSLR using long exposure.

We dined at a Greek restaurant called Millos for the night before heading towards our hotel at the Ramada. This was where the disappointment was. The entire ground floor of the hotel was situated right above a noisy pub/night club and sound was bleeding through the floorboards and walls well into the night. We made a complaint at the front desk but they were quite useless, and when we demanded a refund, we were told that this wasn't possible because we had made a reservation through hotwire.com and not directly with the Ramada. We were left with the foul taste of the one and only experience with the Ramada and learned a valuable lesson: make sure that the room is not directly above any noisy venues or with an air conditioning unit just outside our suite's window.

The morning after, we went to the Swan Cafe for breakfast, then moved on to the Parliament building where I took a casual stroll on the premises to capture the morning rays on the Victorian façade of the grand architecture. I did the same in the area with the Totem Poles beside the Parliament building and again at the Empress Hotel. The National Geographic Theatre at the Royal Museum had nothing all that special to offer at the time of visit as they were in the process of taking down the exhibit that had just ended. We stopped to watch a short movie on the history of British Columbia, however, and it began with the geographical outline of this province and it's population and compared it with a number of European and Asian countries by superimposing its respective geographical outline on top one country at a time, shifting and rotating these countries so they all fit like a jagged jig-saw puzzle on the BC map. With a running tally of the population size of these Asian and European countries that all fit within the geographical area of BC, I had a greater sense of just how sparse we are as British Columbians with more land per capita, and how much of our province was still untouched by the destructive hands of mankind.

A drive around the University of Victoria loop revealed something of an anomaly to which I had not expected. Every where we looked, bunnies of all sizes and colours were everywhere, munching on grass, hiding by the trees, and waiting for a bus at a bus stop. One even crossed the road in my path at a marked pedestrian crosswalk! Seeing these hippidy-hoppidy critters in such numbers concentrated on the campus green lead me to believe that UVic may have a bunny problem on its hands. Perhaps the bunnies were there receiving education. Anything to boost the number of enrolled students I suppose.

Evening rolled by and we were back onto the Tsawwassen-bound ferry back home.