Day 1 continued...

Fun / Interesting facts about Vancouver Island / Victoria:

• Largest island on the west coast of North America
• 2,136 miles of coastline
• 9,396 lakes on the island
• Vicortia is the capital of British Columbia
• Victoria is one the of the sunniest places in BC

Ok...if you haven't read the first part of Day 1, be sure to scroll down and get filled in.

One of the reasons we chose to use this past weekend for our mini-vacation was because Monday was a holiday and Kevin had that day off. We try to maximize his "free" vacation days, but also knew that most destinations within our own country would be quite busy, and quite frankly we aren't too fond of big crowds. Going to Vancouver Island was on our short list of places to see, so we planned our trip north. Our plan was to be home by Monday night to see fireworks - Syd's favorite holiday is July 4th.

On our ferry ride, we began talking about our return trip home. Monday was not going to be fun. For the return ferry ride we had to arrive 2 hours prior to departing. That meant getting to the ferry at 10 am. Not bad. Except....we were staying 5 hours away the night before.

So...we decided to stay an extra day and leave Tuesday instead of Monday. The only problem would be explaining to Sydney why she wouldn't see fireworks.

As we got off the ferry on Friday, July 1st, we very quickly realized something....

July 1st is Canada Day

Canada Day is celebrated much the same as 4th of July - only they leave out the blue and just deck themselves out in red and white. So here we are, trying to avoid the craziness of independence celebrations and we walk right into the capital city of British Columbia on their independence day.

The good news? We could catch the fireworks here and not have disappointed daughters.

So we set off to see Victoria....

here is the entrance to China town

I included this picture so you could get an idea of the crowds. The beautiful building in the background is their seat of government (I think) and as we walked closer, the "living flag" - made up of 2,500 participants - was letting out. That meant that as we approached, we were walking against thousands of people. So much for avoiding crowds and patriotic craziness!

One of the big tourist things to do in Victoria is go whale watching. It's pricey though, so we took pictures of these orcas and called it good.

There were quite a few street performers....including this guy.

After a couple hours we decided to drive around and see if we could find a spot along the water to sit. We got some more views of the "floating mountains"...

And we found a park to hang out in for a while. There was quite a bit to do in Victoria, but we were shocked at the expense of everything. We purposefully sought out as many free things as possible.

We ended the night with fireworks. Not sure where to park in an unfamiliar city, we got as close as we could and then walked another half mile or so (what would that be in kilometers?) The fireworks were good - they shot one after another and the whole thing was over in 10 minutes - no joke. I've never seen such a fast fireworks display. In fact, they were so quick that the sky filled up with smoke and you couldn't even see the fireworks anymore - just colored smoke!