Victoria

We were up bright and early this morning to get downtown to the Port of Seattle. We took the Victoria Clipper (a high-speed ferry) up to Victoria, British Columbia for a day trip. The ferry departed at 7:30 a.m.! Ooof!

The ride was about 3 hours each way, so it was a lot of time on the boat. The nice thing was that since it's not an airplane, we were able to use our "electronic devices" the entire way. Lots of texting, twittering, etc. Nice!

Here I am, showing off my Sea Bands. I'm not especially prone to motion sickness, but I have experienced a bit of it (mainly headaches) on boats before, so I wore them as a precaution. I was fine, except for when the boat was bobbing up and down while we were waiting for everyone to board and depart. Ick. Once the motor was running and we were moving, I was fine.

We arrived in Victoria around 10:30 a.m., and stepped out into the glorious sunshiny day. Here's a photo of the Clipper and all of the passengers waiting in line to get through customs. But we were outside, so who cares?

As I said: Glorious.

We made it through customs really quickly, actually. We did have a casualty, though. The customs officer confiscated our two wonderfully tasty, sweet Fuji apples we had picked up from Safeway the day before. :( Bastards. Those guys probably ate them for lunch!

Once through customs, we set off on foot to go find the scooter rental place. We figured it would be a fantastic way to learn our way around Victoria, so riding the scooters was first up on our agenda. We found it quickly, and within 20 minutes, we were off!

Neither of us had ever driven scooters before, so it was interesting at first. Due to my questionable turning capabilities (at first), I almost ran into a car during my "practice run" around the parking lot. Thankfully, the learning curve was short and I figured it out quickly.

Since we really had no idea where we were going, we just started driving aimlessly. Then, we decided we wanted to drive to the outer coast (not far, but definitely not within walking distance). Before we knew it, we found an area on the coast that had a fantastically long pier to walk down. We parked the scooters and took a stroll.

View from the pier, looking inland. There was a cruise ship docked there.

Once we were done there, we got back on the scooters and headed back to downtown Victoria.

We stopped in Chinatown for a bit...

And even stopped for a quick jaunt (mostly just to take pictures) down the world's most narrow street (Fan Tan Alley).

It really is a "street." There are shops and restaurants back there!

Then we just drove... and drove... and drove. We ended up in some suburbs, and got a little lost finding our way back. It was fun, though. We eventually tired of riding on the scooters (we had them for 3 hours!), and decided to return them.

By this time, we were starving, so we walked up to a pub (Darcy's Pub, to be specific) we had seen during our travels. The food was delicious, the beer hit the spot, and the view was fabulous.

While eating, we were sitting down in that little table area on the left. We got to watch sea planes take off and land throughout our meal.

After lunch/dinner, we decided to just walk around, explore, and take photos.

We eventually ended up at "The Original Christmas Shop," which was literally chock-full of Christmas stuff. Heaven on Earth, if it wasn't JUNE. But hey, it was still kind of cool to see.

I managed to snap a couple of photos before we were informed there are "no photos allowed" in there.

We spent the last hour or so sitting on a park bench overlooking the water. We were exhausted. We had to head back to the Clipper at around 6:00 p.m. to check in, and the boat left at 7:00. We didn't get back to Seattle and through customs until after 10:00! Needless to say, we need sleep. We're totally sleeping in tomorrow!