Road Trip Day 3

Day 3: Victoria, British Columbia

We got up early to make it to the famed Butchart Gardens - a gorgeous garden that used to be a limestone quarry. The owner's wife began this garden and it has developed into a Canadian National Landmark. I had been a few years ago with my mom, aunt and uncle, and Joe had been when he was a little boy. It was well worth the $30 entrance fee! We started by getting some scones and coffee in the cafe and then walked around for a couple of hours. The highlight of our trip was the rose garden. It had every rose imaginable, and labeled the country of origin and date of development. Words cannot describe how beautiful it is there so I will let the pictures speak for themselves. 

Day 3 - Butchart Gardens: Otter Totem Pole, Roses, and Fountain

More beautiful flowers from the Butchart Gardens

After our morning at the Butchart Gardens, we decided to head back downtown and go exploring. We ended up walking all over downtown Victoria. We had tried to go to a hot spot for lunch, but the line was over an hour long, and we knew we had to get our car in the parking spot for the ferry by 3p.m. to make sure we got a spot on the ferry out! Joe decided to use Yelp to find a place to get lunch, and we ended up finding a cute little Mexican place called Hernandez' that had perhaps the best burrito either of us have ever had.

I thought it was really neat that even my Starbucks cup had both English and French on it, as did pretty much everything in town, even my Diet Coke bottle and Joe's Gatorade. 

After parking the car for the ferry, we had more time to go exploring and decided to have cocktails on the pier - hard strawberry/raspberry lemonades for two, please! From our vantage point, we were able to watch people on the boardwalk - both passerbys and local vendors. By 6 o'clock we needed to be back to the ferry parking lot for U.S. Customs inspections (have to make sure no one goes home with Cuban cigars, right?)

Totem poles, lemonade cocktails, bilingual Starbucks cup

We got to watch the sunset over the Straight of Juan de Fuca on our ferry ride back to Port Angeles. Once back to the States, we got to go through customs again. Yes, sir we really only bought tea and magnets in Canada. Seriously.

Knowing we wouldn't get to our hotel in Bellevue, WA until about midnight made me nervous, but Joe insisted that they would be waiting for us to check-in, don't worry. Oh, we didn't worry until we found out that....whoops, we had to take ANOTHER ferry from the Olympic Peninsula to Seattle to get to our destination. Unfortunately, we missed the 11:30 ferry and had to WAIT for the 12:55 AM ferry to Seattle. This is not what we were expecting. Luckily we had started listening to the Steve Jobs' biography so our audiobook kept us entertained while waiting and driving the rest of our way to the hotel.

We finally arrived at our hotel (I made Joe call and tell them we'd be super late) around 2am. It was time to sleep so we could enjoy Seattle in the morning!