Day 10 (7/20) – Breakfast at the restaurant in the hotel lobby, Abode. Walk along the harbor up to the Vancouver Aquarium; with a free preview of seals on the way.
Intentionally left the aquarium trip for Monday hoping it would be less busy and it wasn’t too bad. Far less busy than some trips to Monterey Bay Aquarium that we’ve done. Special exhibits on dragons and axolotls, so it was pretty much designed for our girls. Heather got to hold a gecko.
We ate lunch at the aquarium’s cafe, out through the gift shop, and back to the hotel to crash and rest. Corinne did some swimming in the hotel pool and I rested my feet in the hot tub again. Dinner was on the corner across the street at Coco Rico Cafe. Then to the other side of the street to try Japanese cheesecake. It’s fluffy in contrast to the American smooth/dense variety.
The view of our hotel from the plaza across the street:
Day 9 (7/19) – Having spent more than a week on the road we were now out of clean clothes. I had hoped to find ourselves at a hotel with guest laundry available (either self-serve, or possibly willing to splurge on a service), but that hadn’t happened yet. The hotel on day 8 did have a guest laundry facility, but it was out of service. And here, the Blue Horizon, has a laundry service, but it only operates Monday through Friday and we needed clean clothes sooner than Monday evening.
So I packed up all the dirty laundry into two duffel bags and carried them a half-mile to a laundromat when it opened at 9:30. Fairly nice walk, much of the way was streets that had been closed to vehicle traffic and had trees. Got there early enough to grab two washers–which fit all the laundry with room to spare. With the washers running I walked next door to a cafe for breakfast. My order flag was this classic T-rex toy:
By the time I finished breakfast it was time to move the laundry. On the washers you pay for a wash cycle, but for the dryers you just buy 3 minutes per quarter. So I asked the attendant how long a full load usually takes to dry. She told me about 40 minutes, but it’s a good thing I didn’t listen to her. I put them each in for 27 and they were both almost entirely dry. So I combined the few things that were still damp for another 12 minutes while I folded everything else.
By this time I found myself as the new resident expert on their machines and was helping other people get their laundry going. The machines were…not obvious in their functioning and very often spit back quarters or had quarters get stuck and you’d need to smash the reject button several times to get it to spit out.
Anyway, laundry washed, folded, and loaded back up into the duffel bags for the half-mile walk back to the hotel. The girls had gotten up and eaten breakfast from the bin and with fresh laundry everyone was dressed and ready for lunch. For which we stopped at the new bakery on the corner next to the hotel and split a chocolate croissant, a caramel almond pastry, and a sourdough baguette.
From there we did a little walking tour of the city. First stop the Vancouver Public Library – Central Branch because it’s an interesting building:
Then on to the Gastown Steam Clock, which plays Westminster Chimes via steam whistles! I somehow missed that information when looking it up, so it was a fun surprise. We caught the 1:30 chimes and then looked around at some shops and ate some donuts to await the top of the hour:
More walking to reach Science World (currently dressed up as a soccer ball for the World Cup). The girls had a blast. Lots interactive displays–in working order!
One favorite was the generative-AI system which was seeded with your motion. You could select a prompt as to what kind of images to generate. The girls preferred the kittens and the flowers.
And the other big hit was the responsive, Winter wonderland room. It also responded to your movement with ice-skate tracks, blowing snow, and such.
We closed down the museum and our legs and feet were shot. Fortunately, there was a SkyTrain stop just outside which would get us to ~2/5 of a mile from the hotel. Showing my American-centric viewpoint, in planning the trip I hadn’t even looked at intra-city rail options for getting around. So it was a nice shortcut to take and straightforward to use. Though Jess somehow lost her ticket in the 3 stops we took and had to buy another one to get out.
The girls were beat at this point and ate dinner from the bin and rested their legs. I went for a walk and had a slice of pizza for dinner. Then rested my legs and feet in the hot tub for a little while. Sunset from the hotel window:
Day 8 (7/18) – Breakfast provided by the hotel today! It just so happened that the previous weekend they held a sand sculpture competition in town and, though the competition was complete, the sculptures were available for public viewing and voting. None of us had ever seen professional sand sculptures in person. They were pretty neat. The amount of detail is pretty incredible.
Heather and Corinne both voted for the girl with the dragon. Jess voted for the owl. I voted for the big, furry guy offering free hugs.
Our next stop was the North Island Wildlife Recovery Centre. Which is a larger facility than it seems. You turn a corner and realize it just keeps going, again. Lots of injured birds. Jess enjoyed watching one of the ravens messing with the objects in its enclosure. A different raven, this one leucistic, named Opal, was working on digging a hole under the wall of its enclosure. And we saw a real life axolotl. So the girls were agog.
By the time we finished up with the animals it was past lunch time, but our next stop was the old country market known for the goats on its roof. Which…I give them credit. There’s no reason for anyone to be out at this place. Certainly if they just had a little shop selling sundries they’d be struggling. But, put up a sod roof and throw some goats up there and now you’ve got endless customers. They also have a cafe inside which is where we ate lunch. We saw one of the goats when we first arrived and it’s a good thing I snapped a picture, because we couldn’t see them anymore by the time we left.
The trip plans had an option at this point to head deeper into the island to Horne Lake Caves, but timing dictated we skip it in favor of catching the ferry and getting to our hotel before dark. Driving in cities is stressful enough, driving in a foreign city after dark sounds even less fun.
So we headed back to Nanaimo and lined up for the ferry. This ferry was substantially larger than the one we took to Victoria. I think it had 4 decks for vehicles. This was a 2-hour ferry ride and then we needed to drive into Vancouver proper–which we managed to do during peek rush hour. That was not so much fun, but we did it. We parked the van at the Blue Horizon Hotel and didn’t get back in for 3 days.
After getting the van unloaded through the maze of passageways at the hotel we headed out on foot to look around and find something for dinner. I had read that for the World Cup (and then extended through the end of summer) the city had closed a nearby street to vehicle traffic and created an extended pedestrian mall space. We walked down there, but discovered it seemed to mostly be bars. Wandering around some more we eventually ended up at an Italian restaurant, Pacifico pizzeria & ristorante. It was pretty good. I don’t recall why I’m making the face that I am in the picture. The girls had cookies from the restaurant for dessert. Jess and I got a slice of red-velvet cake and an eclair from a bakery across the street from the hotel. The hotel key cards were wood, which was a fun extravagance.
Day 7 (7/17) – Breakfast across the street at Belleville’s; crepes, blintzes, and French toast. Jess tried a London Fog, she liked it.
Back in the van and north to the Butterfly Gardens. Lots of creatures beyond butterflies hanging about in the space. The leafcutter ants in the lobby are rather fun to watch. An endless line of creatures cutting off bits of leaf and carrying them to their farms on the other side. The exhibit has a long piece of (fake?) vine that winds back and forth a few times from plants to farms so the ants have quite the distance to travel.
In the main exhibit hall there are butterflies, a flamingo, parrots, reptiles, birds, frogs, and probably more. It was hot and humid by design. We thought this would be an issue for Heather, but she spent more time in there than the rest of us taking pictures and videos–particularly the parrots.
After cooling down from the butterfly sauna our trip continued down the road to the Butchart Gardens. A large area filled with carefully cultivated gardens of various types. We had some pastries in the cafe to call lunch before beginning our meanderings.
From the local-artist gallery I decided I really liked this metal maple leaf, it’s about 12 inches across and 14 inches tall:
My original plan was to, next, take a ferry across the Saanich Inlet on our way to the northern part of the island. But there was a rather lengthy-looking line for the ferry and it wasn’t clear how long it was going to take to catch a ride (this is a much smaller ferry than one we took to Victoria). So instead we drove around the inlet to Malahat Skywalk. A tourist trap if there ever was one. It’s a large, tall cylindrical structure with a walking ramp to the top. At the top are views of the inlet, a “web walk”, a glass ledge to stand on, and a very long slide swirling you back to the bottom. I took the slide first and Corinne followed, but then Heather froze up. So she and Jess walked back down. You can take the slide as many times as you want, but you have to walk all the way back up. Corinne and I rode it a second time before heading out.
From there it was just driving up to Hotel Feng in Parksville. Dinner was A&W eaten at the hotel. Canadian A&W (a separate corporation from American A&W) sadly does not sell fried cheese curds as its American cousin does.
Day 6 (7/16) – Another breakfast from the bin. Good thing we packed that or every morning would have been spent trying to figure out where and what to eat with no easy answers.
The day’s first stop was the Hoh Rain Forest. An appropriately rainy drive on our way in and a ~30-minute wait at the entrance station. But by the time we parked at the visitor center the rain had let up. We listened to the tail end of a ranger talk, looked around the visitor center, and then walked the 1.2 mile Spruce Nature Trail which takes you out to the bank of the Hoh River.
Next to the river there was a deer and fawn wandering about. We spent 30 minutes or so hanging out by the river, skipping rocks, and watching the clouds drift among the hillside trees.
Lunch was from the bin plus gas-station snacks as we made our way to Port Angeles to catch the ferry to Victoria. Once situated in the standby line we killed time by walking through the shops on the wharf and had some New Zealand style ice cream which is kind of made-to-order soft serve featuring fresh fruit. It was cool and rainy so I found a cafe to get some hot chocolate to drink while waiting for the ferry–which was late. But we managed to get on. Two more cars after us and they closed the doors. Packed in very tight (though, since they didn’t end up squeezing in anyone behind us, we didn’t need to be packed so tight). Once parked you have to leave the vehicle deck for the 90-minute trip across the Salish Sea, so getting out was a bit of a squeeze. Jess had to climb in back to get out using the sliding doors (sliding doors are practically the perfect door design for a ferry-carried vehicle).
Off the ferry on the other side we waited in line for customs for a while before proceeding to our hotel, the Royal Scot Hotel. Settled at the hotel we took a walk through the primary tourist strip in Victoria headed towards the Irish Times Pub for dinner (recommended to us by friends). Sadly, by the time we arrived it was a quarter to 9 and the pub kicks out all minors at 9 so we couldn’t eat there. Instead we found a by-the-slice pizza place, Pizza Garden, and Corinne had chicken nuggets and fries from a Burger King across the street. For dessert we looked in about 6 different ice-cream shops (I’m pretty sure there was one on every block on each side of the street) before settling on gelato and cheesecake-on-a-stick. Then, finally, back to the hotel to crash for the night.
