Butchart Gardens photos and a tip

Do you have plans to see Butchart Gardens, or hope to someday? Vancouver Island's gem had been on my to-see list for decades. Finally, on a July 2016 Roadtrek trip that included time on the island, I got my wish. It was fantastic, and I'd love to go again to see the spring or fall extravaganzas. 

After strolling along lush flower-lined paths the view opens to this, a grand floral display, just one part of the gardens that were started more than 100 years ago in an abandoned quarry. A sparse late-day crowd makes enjoying the details easy.

This should be a video to show the ever-changing fountain patterns. 

It's not all about showy flowers but also the subtle colors, textures, and design of greenery. 

Meticulous attention to creating living art is evident throughout the gardens.

The route provided to the Gardens by our GPS surprised us. It wasn't a freeway or a wide two-lane road with turning lanes and a bike path to accommodate the Garden's nearly one million annual visitors.  Instead, it's a narrow twisty turney country road. PK kept repeating, "This can't be right!" as we wound through the countryside. Butchart Gardens is about 14 miles from the city of Victoria.

Then suddenly the welcome sign appears and we drive in and the road opens to a vast parking area. A young parking attendant appears on a bicycle to lead us to where Class B RVs (Class B means small) are parked. Since it's around 4:30 p.m., there's only one, another Roadtrek, remaining in the parking lot and we pull in beside it. Rain threatens, so we grab our umbrellas and head for the entry gate. (No need to bring your own umbrellas as there are baskets of loaners for visitors' use.)

Cost of adult admission to one of the most lavish gardens on earth? Around $32 CA dollars. At the exchange rate available then, about $24 US dollars. Ticket prices vary by season. Soon after entering, we learned that the admission included an outdoor concert starting at 8 p.m. Bonus!

Another surprise bonus was arriving late in the day. We didn't do so on purpose; we'd driven from Tofino (post coming soon) and didn't reach our reserved-in-advance RV park until mid-afternoon.
Tour busses were departing as we arrived, and although we didn't have the gardens to ourselves, at no time did we feel crowded or frustrated. A couple days later, on the ferry back to Port Angeles, WA. I talked with a woman who had been at the gardens a few days before we were.

Her experience was not that good.

"We got there at 9:30 a.m. and it was OK, but a half hour later we were overrun," she reports.
"We couldn't even take photos for all the people crowding around us."

For us, touring all the gardens, stopping for a gelato, and even a light cafeteria-style supper, required about 2.5 hours. I'm sure if we'd been battling crowds and waiting in lines we would have needed another hour or so.  As it was, we had an hour to kill before the concert. Lucky for us, we had our Roadtrek retreat. We rested there a bit and enjoyed a glass of wine before reentering the gardens to find the concert lawn. Again, no waiting, no hassle.

PK makes his way to the concert lawn. Many people brought chairs, but we were OK with sitting on wooden benches.

The Tip
If you visit, consider the late-in-the-day option, especially during summer and early fall while days are still long and concerts are offered. (Daily until September 3 this year, with fireworks Saturday nights) . You'll miss the crush of tourists and perhaps hear some wonderful music. We loved The Oyster Band, comprising Brits and Scotts, who provided 90 minutes of lively entertainment. 

The profusion look of a country garden in the Rose Garden area.

A young visitor primps for a selfie in the Italian Garden, where we enjoyed gelato along with the lushness.

Here's my idea of a selfie. 

More Roadtrek travel posts

The Hoh, the hikes, and the bike scum - Experiencing the Olympic National Park, Hoh Rainforest, July 2016

Us and Them, Then and Now - traveling in our respective vans with our son and his girlfriend made clear some generational differences. But it was all good. June 2016

Chasing the Death Valley Super Bloom, 2016 - This was our first trip with the Roadtrek, and I was just getting used to traveling in such a luxury unit after all our years of car and tent camping, and then a pop-up camper. I didn't take photos of the van because it seemed like showing off!  March  2016

Loving Death Valley Part 2 -  March 2016

Headed for Victoria, VI? Bring bikes!

Our July 2016 trip to British Columbia's Vancouver Island exceeded expectations. My preconceived notions about Canadians (snooty) and the city of Victoria (congested, commercial and difficult to navigate) were wrong, wrong, wrong. I had also underestimated the beauty and allure of other places we visited on the Island. 

Photo taken from the Royal British Columbia Museum overlooking Victoria's Inner Harbor. Lined with historic buildings, shops, restaurants, vendors, and buskers on wide pedestrian-and-bike-friendly streets, the harbor is the heart of the city. The museum's First Nation exhibits alone are worth the price of admission, which is CA $24 for adults, $17, seniors and youth six and older. The exchange rate was favorable to US citizens, so those, and all other Canadian prices, translated  roughly into a 25 percent discount.

Victoria, British Columbia's capital, adorns the southern tip of Vancouver Island. It's a spirited city full of history and beauty, water and flowers, boats and .....bicycles! Known as the Cycling Capital of Canada, the city is a wonder of interconnecting bike paths, bike lanes, and, most astonishingly,  bicycle-friendly drivers!

The Galloping Goose is a 34-mile rails-to-trail, part of an
impressive network of cyling/walking trails that make the Victoria region
a boon to bicycle commuters and also a cycling destination.

Paul on an unpaved stretch of the Galloping Goose trail. The packed gravel surface
worked fine with our skinny-tire road bikes.

By "bicycle-friendly" I mean if you're standing with your bike on a traffic island awaiting a green light, drivers will STOP and let you go, even with a long line of traffic behind. They will give you lots of space in your bike lane and, in the rare event a bike lane doesn't exist, they'll hold back to allow you to slip into your rightful place in the traffic lane. We experienced and saw these behaviors numerous times.

Our first night on Vancouver Island we scored (advance reservation) a site at the Westbay Marine Village and RV Park. This park has 61 sites and is smack in the middle of the harbor area. Except for its location, it's nothing special. It cost $42.50 a night, not including wifi or showers. But the great location allows campers to walk, bike, or catch a water taxi to outstanding restaurants and tourist sites. We couldn't get reservations at Westbay for our return trip.

The view from the water's edge of the Westbay Marine Village. That big ship is a ferry. The harbor is abuzz all day with private boats, water taxis, seaplanes, tour boats and so on. Surprisingly, the park was quiet at night. 

I admit, I was leery about biking in Victoria. I am not at all keen about biking in cities, let alone large unfamiliar ones. PK, however, was game the afternoon we arrived. I prevailed, as it was late in the day, and even he agreed we'd be better off starting a bike adventure in the morning. Instead we took a harbor ferry/taxi across the bay into the historic downtown, had a great dinner and walked back on a waterfront trail skirting the harbor, discussing our cycling plans.

This is what we saw the next  morning. No cycling. Boo hiss!

 Even the campground's waterfront sites couldn't escape gloom. Fortunately,
this was the wettest of our 11 days on the island. 

The harbor ferry stops next to the Marine Village and takes passengers

across to the Fisherman's Wharf. From there, you can take a series of walkways,
including a paved walking path skirting the harbor, back to the RV Park.
Without dawdling, it can be navigated  in about an hour. But why hurry?

Classy houseboats (marine homes) are part of the Westbay Marine Village . A sign asks visitors to respect occupants' privacy. It also says residents live here year-round and explains, because they know you were wondering, that all houseboats are hooked into the city's sewer system. Note the floating flower garden.

Sailboat moorage is next to the colorful houseboats and part of the Marine Village.. 

Glimpse of Inner Harbor action from the water taxi—a sea plane roaring in behind a whale watching craft.

On our return trip we stayed two nights in the Fort Victoria RV Park. It has 742 sites and we got the last available space reserving two days in advance. (We couldn't get into the Marina  again.) We stayed two nights and had a TERRIBLE site under big power lines and towers the first night, but were able to move the next night. 

The worst (but most high-powered) campsite ever! But Fort Victoria RV Park in Victoria had benefits. Chief among them, its proximity to a bike path connecting with the 34-mile Galloping Goose Trail. It also had strong wifi, a rarity, and the cleanest most commodious bathroom/shower facility I've ever seen in an RV park. $40 a night. 

If it wasn't for reconnecting, via Facebook, with a dear friend from my distant past, we probably  wouldn't have visited Vancouver Island.

Lesson learned - The Island is way too good to spend just a few measly days, as we did. We're already sketching out a return trip that includes more time in and around Victoria, a lot more bicycling, Vancouver Island Music Festival, and a return visit to Tofino and Ucuelet. Not to mention places we didn't get to. I'd say 3 weeks might be enough. (Posts about the music festival and Tofino are in draft.) 

More photos, and a link to our Butchart Gardens visit.

Especially fetching hanging baskets enliven Victoria's Inner Harbor area.

Typical Victoria street scene. Food and drink, art and music, 

A Victorian-looking bank on a Victoria street.

One image from the Royal British Columbia Museum's First Nations exhibits. Outstanding. 

 Other posts from this trip:

Butchart Gardens 
Hoh Rainforest on the Olympic Peninsula, The Hoh, the Hikes and the Bike Scum

Change is Strange

Dear Readers,

And I do mean dear. Thank you for sticking with me and my Ordinary Life blog, which I have been posting on Google's free Blogger platform sporadically since my first entry on June 2, 2009.*

 

Lost in techie wilderness!

The freaking tech giant (Google) announced a couple months ago that it would be discontinuing emailing posts to blog subscribers as of July 1, 2021. They suggested bloggers find some other way to get their posts to subscribers. 

What was a techie dunce to do?  The answer arrived in a timely email targeting bloggers left in the lurch. A company called follow.it offered to take on the subscription task and extended technical help to install a new subscription "gadget" on blogs and to import existing email subscribers at no charge. I did end up paying someone to help me, but I appreciated follow.it for their gesture. 

Perhaps you'll notice on this post the new email subscription form on the right, which is larger than before. If you got this post via email, no need to reenter your email address. (If you have a minute, though, I'd appreciate knowing that this post arrived in your mailbox, even if you're reading it on Facebook.)

How and why you subscribed to my blog (thank you again!) is a mystery. Except for family and friends, drawing new readers is a challenge. You might notice in coming posts invitations to "share."  Please consider doing that. 

*That first post in 2009 was titled Another Day, Another Storm.  I accidentally discovered much later that Blogger tracks readership stats for every post. NO ONE READ IT.  Here's a screenshot of my first attempt at blogging 🤪. Probably best it wasn't seen.

Tofino, Vancouver Island. Yes.

Note: We're prepping for a road trip to the East Coast, so I better get this post out before new adventures eclipse our recent visit to Vancouver Island, which was agreeable on many levels.

Ok, so Tofino is touristy. But we are tourists.....and sometimes it's good to enjoy briny air, whales, eagles, beautiful beaches--some with wave-crazed surfers--great food and bike paths, even if others are in close proximity. Many others. 

Dramatic clouds formed as we searched for whales on a tour with only about 30 people. It wasn't a crowded situation. Especially regarding  whales, unfortunately, but we did glimpse a few.

A humpback whale surfaced not far from our whale-watching craft.  But the only way I could see it was by
checking my telephoto shots after the fact. I had no idea I'd actually caught an image. Nice surprise! Mediocre shot!

We arrived in Tofino in our little Roadtrek van in mid-July, prime tourist time. We'd been clued in to Tofino's assets, but I was surprised and delighted by how close those assets are. The ocean is close, the islands are close, the eagles, the restaurants, the temperate rainforests, the hikes, all minutes away, squeezed into the tip of a tiny peninsula.

Case in point. Our campground. We are several tiers back. The towering cedars and firs ease the cheek-to-jowl situation. We got the last site available. Sorta common for us, it seems.


Paul doesn't much care for cheek-to-jowl camping. On this night we could hear the guy next door sawing logs big time in his pop-up trailer. And on the other side, an Airstream with a baby crying. Still, it was a beautiful setting, perfect weather, and we could hear the ocean and the birds.

A favorite image from Tofino, a bald eagle being pursued by seagulls after the eagle attempted to plunder seagull nests. Eagles are scavengers and predators not unlike other birds of prey. Only USA citizens have assigned them a higher calling. 

Tofino's harbor with at least five islands visible.You could swim over for a visit.

Trendy Tofino, just outside the wonderful Wolf in the Fog restaurant, which Tripadvisor ranks as only the fifth most
popular in Tofino out of 36.. Number one? Chocolate Tofino. Ice cream.

Paul, a guy who doesn't like clams, oysters, shrimp etc,  surprised me by ordering this lunch from Wolf in the Fog's menu:cod cheeks and clams!!!! We shared a seaweed and shiitake salad.

The well-stocked bar at Wolf in the Fog bar. We chose this restaurant the best possible way; riding our bikes to town from our campground, I stopped to ask a dog-walking local his recommendation.

Big fat jellyfish doing a raw egg imitation in Tofino's harbor

Big guy seal with attitude oversees a bored harem, seen from the whale-sighting cruise, which lasted about 3 hours.

We didn't get to this restaurant, but you can't argue with the location. 

Tofino appears to be an active fishing port. 

Tofino is a small lively community, even when bloated with tourists, and campers need to make reservations or take a chance with winging it. We didn't exactly wing it, but got a reservation a few days in advance at an RV park.

We inquired too late to get into the Grass Point National Park campground not far out of town, and instead settled for a private campground that crammed 181 sites into prime beachfront property. Numerous spaces are on the beach, or have ocean views, but that was not the case with us, parked several tiers back, not far from one of the THREE restrooms serving the entire park.  Canadians call them "washrooms". If you ask for a restroom, they think maybe you're looking for a quiet place to nap.

 The one closest to us had two working toilets (out of three) and the one and only shower was out of order. And the cleaning crew was apparently on vacation. This is why boondocking - camping in free but legal places - is a growing phenomenon. We paid $40+ for this? But I quibble. We did have electricity, which we don't really need, and access to a great beach during beautiful weather.  On to the good stuff.

A bike path runs several miles paralleling the main road, and was accessible from our campground. We've hauled our bikes on too many trips where we didn't ride them enough to warrant the trouble. On Vancouver Island the bikes saw a lot of action.

Ahhh, a bike path! Just under 4 miles long, it allows visitors and residents to get around without driving.

Eagle portrait captured in the Tofino harbor as we departed on a 

whale watching tour. Guides said that 140 nesting pairs make 

their home around Tofino. It was a joy to see a few.

We didn't spend enough time in the Tofino/Ucluelet area. Ucluelet is small town about 20 miles from Tofino, which we drove through to reach the Wild Pacific Trail, a terrific way to spend a late afternoon taking in the coastal drama.

 The drive to this peninsula is also noteworthy.  Hwy. 4 passes the MacMillan Cathedral Grove, which somehow rivals a redwood forest, and includes a twisting narrow section through dramatic peaks and valleys with grades of 11 percent to 18 percent. Needless to say, but I will anyway, do not ride your bike to Tofino!

Part of the lush understory of the MacMillan Cathedral Grove.

Yet another opportunity for awe. Or ahhh. En route to Tofino.

Earlier posts about Vancouver Island
Butchart Gardens- bring your camera
Victoria - Bring your bike