Hey all,

For Victoria Day, the boyfriend and I decided we’d take a short getaway to Victoria— the island. You know what? I didn’t realize that Victoria Day was to celebrate Queen Victoria until probably two years ago. I always thought it was a random day to celebrate the island where our Parliament resided.

Anyway, get ready for picture dump.

We took the coach to Victoria. It was my first time coaching since my family had always driven onto the ferry, but I can say that it was a great experience and I’d be alright with doing it again. The bus drivers are super friendly, and not having to deal with lining up to board the ferry on foot was great. You also get first dibs to lining up for food in the ferry, and those lines can basically take the entire ferry trip.

We got to our hotel at around 11AM, having taken the 7:30AM coach and luckily enough, they had a room ready for us! We dropped off our stuff and walked downtown. Our hotel was not super close to downtown, but we decided to walk it to see how far it was. We stopped along the way to visit Chinatown. We had expected it to be super boring, but the two blocks or so we visited were pleasantly interesting!

We checked out Fan Tan alley, which is rumored to be haunted. We didn’t find ghosts, but we did find very interesting shops that sold trinkets and toys we remembered from our childhood (chinese finger traps anyone? whoopee cushions?). But we couldn’t stop long since we had planned to eat at Fisherman’s Wharf. So we left Chinatown and headed straight there. With a few detours to do touristy stuff like take pictures in front of the Parliament and look at the Empress Hotel:

By the time we finally got there, we were starving. Which was good because it made the food that much more delicious! We shared fish and chips, an oyster sandwich, and a three-salmon chowder. It’s was so good and definitely worth it. As we ate, we watched kids feed the seal, though a random sea otter kept vying for the food.

After our nice meal, we rounded it off with ice cream! Sea salt caramel with caramel cups that were soft on its inside! How do they do that? Nobody knows!

Taking our ice cream, we walked to Beacon Hill Park. My bf said there was a petting zoo there, and I wasn’t super excited. Mostly because I was exhausted from walking all day, and plus, what would be there? A lamb or two? I was wrong. It was a pretty amazing petting zoo. The entrance fee was by donation, but it was well worth it.

They had:

These aren’t all the animals. There were pigs, rabbits, birds, guinea pigs, and lots of other small animals. The lambs and goats were really the only animals you could “pet”, but kids sure did try to run at random chicken who had escaped their enclosure or grab at squawking peacocks. The alpacas were the cutest things there! They were so derp. I’m glad we visited the petting zoo. Not only had I not been to one for years, but I don’t recall them being this good.

We ended the night with going to Sushi Matsuri. We had a list of restaurants we wanted to visit during our trip and this was one of them. Walking in, we knew we made the right choice. They were playing our favorite documentary there: Jiro Dreams of Sushi. If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend you do. The food there was really fresh!

After returning to the hotel, it mainly consisted of us pigging out on popcorn, marathoning Storage Wars since it was on TV, and then passing out because we were so physically tired. Not bad for a first day! It also felt very long, which felt very satisfying.

For days 2 and 3, I’ll put up a separate post. This one is getting a tad long!

– Karen