July 13, 2024. Day 6 of trip.
(Tim):
I woke up too early this morning. We are trying to figure out optimal sleeping arrangements and Annalise wants Ranger to sleep at the foot of her bed. Ranger has always slept in his crate at night and is not accustomed to sleeping next to a human. This morning, Heidi woke up early and used the restroom (which is adjacent to Annalise’s bed.) Ranger heard the noise, got up, and decided we were done sleeping for the night. He followed Heidi back to our bed, and the clicking of his nails on the RV floor woke me up. Naturally, Heidi brought Ranger into our bed where he started licking my face. I don’t know about you, but once a dog starts licking my face in the morning I can’t fall back to sleep.
I took Ranger for a walk on the beach this morning while Heidi got ready. We wanted to arrive at Butchart gardens right when they opened at 9AM to beat the rush of tour busses. Our current location is only a 20-minute drive from Butchart gardens so we set a goal to depart by 8:30. I had to expend significant effort to get the kids up as both of them wanted to sleep longer, but we managed to get them up, feed them a quick breakfast, and departed nearly on time.
(Heidi):
We were one of the first cars in the parking lot at Butchart Gardens. We were happy to be enjoying the gardens in the crisp, cool morning air. The vibrant bright pinks, purples, yellows and oranges of the many flowers were astounding. There were several exclamations from Dexter of “Woah!” throughout the gardens. His favorite thing to see was the Ross Fountain in the Sunken Gardens. We stood there for quite a while to make sure we watched it go through its cycle of different spray shows several times. It was definitely a more peaceful experience than watching the fountains at the Bellagio in Las Vegas.
What really took me by surprise today was the Rose Garden. Yes, coming from the City of Roses I have seen many gorgeous roses, but today took me by surprise. You know the saying “stop and smell the roses”? I always thought that meant to just slow down and take your time enjoying the simple things in life. Well today, a particular rose caught my eye that I stopped and smelled. It was the Heavenly Scented Rose developed in 2022 in the U.S.A. This rose was the most fragrant, unique smelling rose I have ever sniffed. It did have that unique rose scent, but had some citrus lemon-like top notes. It was incredible! I made Annalise come over and smell it as she is one to appreciate the world through her sense of smell. She loved it too and could smell what I was smelling. We then began going through the garden with fresh eyes and noses, smelling everything we could get close too. We realized that every single rose had a distinctly unique scent and a lot of the roses had names that hinted at their scent like Raspeberry Cupcake for example. The fact that I had never noticed or thought about that before seemed crazy! It was so nice to have the time to literally stop and smell the roses and to appreciate the genius that is our Creator.
We started to get hot at the garden and it started getting crowded, so we left to head back to the RV to let Ranger out before heading to Tim Horton’s for lunch. I’d always heard about this Canadian institution, but have never eaten at one. Tim and I both had different veggie wraps which were delicious and we all shared a box of Timbits (donut holes). Tim thought those were hilarious, so he posed with the box they came in.
While we were sitting and enjoying our lunch, I realized that I forgot to pack my anti-nausea meds for our whale watching excursion. Lucky for us, Tim Horton’s was next to a Shopper’s Drug Mart. I usually like to take Bonine before flying or getting on a boat because it doesn’t make me as drowsy as Dramamine, but apparently meclizine (the drug in Bonine) is banned in Canada. So, I had to buy and take something they had that was more similar to Dramamine.
(Tim):
We drove back down to Victoria and spent time walking around the harbor and admiring the ships prior to our Whale Watching excursion at 3:30. We chose the excursion that was via zodiac which included 12 passengers, 1 captain, and speeds up to 30 knots. We were all required to wear Mustang Survival Coveralls as our floatation devices and it was miserably hot, at least at first. After 15 minutes of low speed cruising to get out of the harbor, we went full speed in a southwesterly direction. Before long, we spotted a breech of a humpback whale and went that direction to watch him (or her) do a few dives. We spent a bunch of time following this particular whale, and then we proceeded to another area where we saw at least 2 or 3 additional whales. The humpback whales were hunted to “regional extinction” in this area, only returning in the late 1990s. At this point, there are a large number of humpback whales who migrate from Mexico or Hawaii up to Alaska and go through this area twice a year on their migrations.
We didn’t see any Orca whales today as they were beyond the range of our “3 hour tour.” We saw a bald eagle, some harbor seals and even a mama duck with a brood of ducklings.
(Heidi):
We got back pretty late from whale watching and we were all hungry but wanted to get out of downtown Victoria. We made a quick stop for cotton candy and then went looking for supper.
We typically have homemade pizza on Saturday nights, but tonight was too exhausting so we wanted to buy pizza instead of making our own. I ended up finding us this place called Q Pizza. It had a most interesting menu of Indian inspired pizza dishes and other interesting side dishes. We ended up getting cheese pizza for the kids, of course. But, for us, we got a Tikka Masala Pizza that had paneer on it and some cheese fries that were baked and served with Indian spices and chipotle sauce drizzled on top. It was a most interesting and delicious dinner.
SAOTD: Heidi & Annalise who took Canadian Dramamine which made them sleepy during the whale watching trip.