Victoria, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada

Victoria, Vancouver Island, British Columbia, Canada - August 16

If you ever tell anyone that you plan to travel to Victoria, BC, Canada, it seems that everyone remarks ‘Be sure to go to Butchart Gardens”.

I can assure you that in the future I will tell anyone going to Victoria  ‘Be sure to go to Butchart gardens’. It is spectacular. They have more flowers than you can imagine, laid out in beautiful settings, and the flowers they grow are on steroids. 

I took over 250 pictures on our Victoria trip day, and about 200 of them are of beautiful flowers.

To get to Victoria from Vancouver you need to take about a 1-1/2 hour ferry ride. We couldn’t decide whether to take the Motorcoach  and Toad over and stay for a few days, then take a different ferry back into the US to Seattle which would save a good bit of driving, or just make a day trip of it in the Toad and take the longer Motorcoach drive back into the US. The day trip won out after looking at all the problems and expense of taking the Motorcoach over.

It is a beautiful ferry ride over.

After landing on Vancouver Island we headed directly for Butchart Gardens with the camera in hand.

First things first….

Then on to the walk thru the gardens.

Did I mention how large the blooms are? That is Sylvia’s hand in the picture above for comparison with the size of the flower. I had her insert hand for those blooms that were unbelievably large.

As mentioned, there are a couple hundred more flower images, but they will have to go unpublished due to space limitations and risk of complete boredom on the viewers’ part.

Victoria City is really flower oriented as evidenced by this watercraft in the downtown Victoria harbor.

But they do know how to have fun also.

Their government buildings are quite impressive.

As are their hotels

This Convention center is part of the hotel.

A Bell Tower is located in the middle of the hustle-bustle of the Victoria seaport and government buildings that plays beautiful music, I assume every hour

There are also the familiar double-decker busses you see in most British oriented countries.

We walked the walkway around the harbor.

Transportation around the harbor includes these cute little water taxis that are busily running back and forth across the harbor..

We found this fine example of a condo building along the waterfront walk.

We had dinner at the Restaurant in the converted Gatsby Mansion.

On the ferry trip back we had a beautiful sunset that lit up this still snow-covered mountain.  

And was beautiful looking directly at the sunset just before docking back in Vancouver.