Last Wednesday morning, December 29th, we headed over to Vancouver Island for a 2-night trip to celebrate our fourth wedding anniversary (Dec 30th).
It was while we were on the way to the ferry that we realised our car had been broken into while we were at the Museum of Anthropology the previous night. Our first clue was when we spent so long looking for Tommy that we risked missing our ferry, and then we realised that his charger and mount were gone too! There was no sign of a break in, and even my wallet had been placed back in my handbag and under my coat (albeit with a few cards missing). It's very rare that I leave my handbag in the car anyway, but I hadn't wanted to carry it around the museum the previous night. Ah, hindsight!!
It took a couple of hours to realise the full extent of what was missing... and what with cancelling my credit card, thinking about identity theft, and finding our destination via the temperamental GPS function on the secondhand Android phone Ben had serendipitously purchased 5 days earlier, the start of our getaway was not quite as blissful as we had hoped! But to look on the bright side, this is the first time in all our travels that we have ever been robbed... and as these things go, it's at the minor end of the scale: the inconvenience of what was taken (in particular, Tommy and my Aussie driver's licence) is much worse than the monetary value of what we lost.
After our 2-hour ferry ride from Tsawwassen to Duke Point, we managed to find our way to our destination for the first night: the home of our friends Lorne and Michelle and their three kids, near the city of Nanaimo, BC. They were enjoying lunch when we arrived, and later we went for a walk in a nearby woodland park with Lorne and the kids. It was quite chilly during our time on the island (between -4 and 3 degrees), and the kids looked very cute all rugged up!
Portia
Will and me
Isla Rae and Lorne
That night we had a delicious dinner - prepared by Michelle while we were out walking - and then went to the meeting. Afterwards, back home and with the kids sound asleep, we stayed up late talking to Lorne and Michelle. It was a very enjoyable visit and we hope to do it again sometime!
The next day was our anniversary. After a yummy hot breakfast cooked by Michelle, we set off on the 2-hour drive south to Victoria, BC's capital city. Delle and I had visited Victoria
in the summer, but Ben had never been there before. When we reached Victoria, we drove around looking at the sights as it was too early to check into our hotel yet. We followed the coastline to the south and east of Victoria, taking in stunning views of snowcapped mountains on the mainland, big stately houses, and a seaplane coming in to land.
We stopped for afternoon tea in an area called Oak Bay. Having high tea is a popular activity in and around Victoria, and there are a number of "tea rooms" catering to this market. The one we had hoped to go to (due to its positive customer reviews, and prices half those of the Empress) was full, so we walked a few blocks to another one we had driven past earlier:
The Blethering Place. It was a large room lined with kitschy British junk and a casual rather than posh vibe. There, instead of having the full "high tea" experience with lots of sweet and savoury goodies and pots of tea, we just ordered one treat each. We figured the amount we saved made up for the amount of cash that was stolen from my wallet!!
After a bit of a browse in a nearby secondhand bookshop, we drove back to Victoria to check in to our hotel. This was our fancy anniversary treat: we stayed at the famous
Fairmont Empress, the stately vine-covered building on the Inner Harbour in Victoria! The Empress is an iconic symbol of the city, over 100 years old, and has hosted the likes of Shirley Temple, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth (i.e. the Queen Mother). It was a very nice place to stay and we definitely recommend it!
Here's a panorama showing the view of the Inner Harbour from our third-floor room...
We had arrived just before sunset (which is currently around 4:30pm), and the Parliament Buildings looked incredible at night, outlined in little lights. This is the domed building visible on the left side of the above panorama. I believe the buildings are lit up year-round, but normally just in gold lights rather than the Christmassy red and green as well. It looked gorgeous!
Around 5pm, we got the valet to retrieve our car (hehe, that's the first time we've ever been able to say that!), and drove half an hour north to the
Butchart Gardens. The 55-acre gardens are a popular tourist attraction on the island, and you may remember that Delle and I visited them
in the summer.
The gardens have five seasons: the usual four, plus Christmas. So the purpose of our visit was to see their Christmas lights and famous "Twelve Days of Christmas" displays... and it was a very different experience to my summertime visit! The gardens were dark and extremely cold, but spectacularly lit in millions of tiny lights, with live Christmas music and a festive mood all around. It was even better than we had anticipated; we were both very impressed!
The excellent "Festive Brass" quartet...
Click here to watch some videos of Festive Brass.
The "Twelve Days of Christmas" displays each involved one of the gifts that "my true love gave to me" in the Christmas song. Some of them were literal and some of them involved puns. They were spread throughout the gardens, so we came across them gradually during our 2.5 hours there, and it was amusing to hear the other visitors getting the song mixed up as they sang it to figure out what each display was! We didn't see the first-day-of-Christmas display until Ben went back to find it at the end, but I'll put them all here in order for your enjoyment...
A partridge in a pear tree...
Two turtle doves...
Three French hens (this is my favourite)...
Four calling birds...
Five golden rings...
Six geese a-laying...
Seven swans a-swimming...
Eight maids a-milking (this was Ben's favourite - the cow's head was even nodding gently!)...
Nine ladies dancing (each one was a fairytale or nursery rhyme character)...
Ten lords a-leaping (they were frogs, and the five on the left were springing up and down)...
Eleven pipers piping (this was in the Italian section of the gardens, so they had puppets of eleven Italian storybook characters, and recorded pipe music playing)...
And twelve drummers drumming (these were on twelve arches over the exit driveway, so we only saw them properly as we were leaving)...
So it was quite fun to walk around finding all of those! Here are a few other photos from the gardens as well... they don't even come close to showing how pretty it was in person though!
After we finished walking around the gardens, we arrived back at the bandstand, where the brass quartet and a carolling quartet had been taking it in turns to have half-hour sets all evening. We listened to the carollers and then part of the brass quartet's next set, before deciding we should leave because we were ridiculously cold!
Back at the Empress, we took some photos in the lobby and then turned in for the night.
The next morning, we checked out some of the Christmas trees scattered throughout the Empress - they were sponsored by local businesses and some were decorated according to a relevant theme - and then had breakfast in
The Empress Room.
After we checked out of the hotel, we went next door to the
Royal BC Museum and spent 2 hours enjoying the excellent exhibits there. The museum had been recommended to us by a number of our friends, and we weren't disappointed! We learnt about everything from world history to Canadian ecosystems to First Nations to the development of British Columbia. One section was set out like a little street with all the old shops etc, and they also had sections dedicated to logging and maritime history (including the dagger that is believed to have killed Captain Cook in Hawaii!).
The least-blurry photo of chipmunks you'll ever see on our blog!
Beaver
Life-sized woolly mammoth
Life-sized deer in a forest diorama
An awesome red box crab
The view of the Inner Harbour from the third floor of the museum (Parliament at the left; Empress at the right)...
Horses and carriages outside the museum..
After we left the museum, it was time to head up to Swartz Bay to catch the ferry back to Tsawwassen, a 1.5-hour cruise as the sun set on the last day of 2010. We arrived home in time to host a New Year's Eve party with the few of our friends who weren't away for the holidays.
We had a wonderful anniversary getaway - here's to many more!
