After leaving the World’s Fair and the Seattle area, we continued our travels north. Soon after crossing into Canada, we took a ferry to Vancouver Island. The main city on the island is Victoria. It was a really pretty area and a nice drive in the Porsche with the top down.
We visited the Fairmont Empress. It is a well known, very old hotel that is famous for its Afternoon Tea. We didn’t partake, for several reasons. We weren’t “dressed to the nines,” the tea is rather expensive (at the time $36.00 each), we don’t drink tea, and we were there in the morning! Afternoon tea is served later in the day. But we did explore the hotel and the gardens.
While we were in the area, we visited the harbor, which had not only marinas and ferry landings, but also had a seaplane port. There was certainly a lot going on there.
We visited Butchart Gardens. It was a beautiful place to visit, with an enormous amount to see. The gardens were interesting and so was the statuary.
After enjoying the many sights on the Island, we took the ferry back to Vancouver. One of the places we visited was the Oriental Market. The things I remember most about it...very colorful, extremely crowded, and loud. We certainly saw many items in the food market that we didn’t see on the Plains of West Texas.
We decided we might need an extra fan belt. There was a new Porsche dealer in Vancouver, but we had trouble finding it. One man gave us directions and said in a British accent, “You can’t miss it.” Well, we did! Finally, after several tries, we were able to find the dealership. And we solved a mystery...the amount of interest in our car. Wherever we parked it we would find a crowd around it when we came back. At the car place we were told there were only three Porsches in the entire city. Our little powder blue car with a white cloth top was certainly a curiosity!
On our way back toward the US border, we stopped at a roadside stand and bought bing cherries. They were so-o-o-o good. When we were crossing at the border, we commented about how tasty they were and the border guard said we could turn around and go back to buy some more. We said we would keep going and buy some when we got into Washington state. Guess what? We didn’t see any place along the way to buy cherries. We were really bummed about it.
Oh, well! So long, Canada!
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