Wednesday August 5, 2009 - Victoria, BC Canada

It is hard to believe that our trip is gradually coming to an end. We leave tomorrow morning for our last stop, Seattle, WA.

This morning we slept a bit late, well deserved, and walked into the main section of the old part of Victoria, along Government Street. We found a small cafe/coffee shop for breakfast; I had a bowl of granola and Gail had waffles and berries along with our dark roast coffee. We browsed a bit more in some of the shops and headed over to the Victoria Parliament building. The building was completed in 1896, and to my amazement, was designed at the time by a 25 year old architect. We took a brief guided tour of the Parliament and thus learned a bit of its history and current usage. After the tour we went back to the hotel for a short rest and boarded a coach bus for the trip to Butchart Gardens , which is about 13 miles outside of the Victoria city limits. As I mentioned yesterday, Butchart Gardens is a world famous site in British Columbia. The gardens attract close to a million visitors every year and is made up of four major gardens; Sunken Garden, the Rose Garden, Japanese Garden and the Italian Garden. The gardens were made up of a mixture of rare and exotic shrubs, trees, and flowers. Each section was an amazing array of plants & flowers in intricately laid out patterns and designs with extreme variations of color. Not only were the sights in all the gardens amazing,but the smell of all the flowers was an added attraction. After about 3 hours of enjoying the gardens, we took the bus back to the hotel before heading out to dinner. We found another interesting pub for dinner and brew. By 8:30 PM we were back at the hotel to pack and get ready for our journey on the Victoria Clipper ferry for our ride to Seattle tomorrow morning.