Sun July 20, 2025
Hi Folks! We’re in a new country today! Yes, we are docked in Victoria, British Columbia in Canada. Victoria is the capital city of the Canadian province of British Columbia, on the southern tip of Vancouver Island off Canada’s Pacific Coast. The city has a population of approx 92,000 people. Named for Queen Victoria, the city is one of the oldest in the Pacific Northwest, with British settlement beginning in 1843. The city’s Chinatown is the second oldest in North America, after San Francisco.
Known as “the Garden City”, Victoria is an attractive city and a popular tourism destination. In 2019, it was in the Top 20 world cities for quality of life. They get over 3.5 million overnight visitors per year and over 500,000 daytime visitors via cruise ships (like us!).
They have many free gardens throughout the downtown area but the most famous one is about 11 miles north of the city named Butchart Gardens. Butchart receives over a million visitors per year and has been designated a National Historic Site of Canada. That’s a lot of visitors!
But for us, since we had been to the city before, it was a day of touring and exploring outside the city. We rented a car and drove a big loop around the area called the Pacific Marine Circle Route. It took us to places called Hatley Castle, Sooke, Port Renfrew, Lake Cowichan and Duncan. We had hoped to see bears anywhere along the route but of course we didn’t. Darn bears! But we did see a big old elk! And the funny thing was it was in someone’s back yard along the road. Go figure!
We did a lot of driving and didn’t get back to the ship until 7:30 PM. So we got quick showers and ran up to the Lifo for dinner before they closed. The theme tonight in the Lido was Malaysian food. It was good but dang it was spicy!
It was so late and we were tired from being gone all day so we just went back to the room and finished packing and put our suitcases out in the hallway. Seattle has this cool free service called Port Valet where they take our bags from the ship, check us in for our flight, give us our boarding passes and our luggage shows up in Charlotte. No schlepping it to the airport. Sweet! Just hope our bags make it there!
We get off the ship tomorrow but booked a tour of Seattle that will drop us off at the airport. I’ll do a final trip update on Tues July 22nd since we’re taking a red eye flight back. This has been another amazing trip! Hope everybody had a great weekend!
The Wandering Italian 