Victoria - Day 2

Today we all had a bit more sleep and a bit more patience which was great!

We woke up and had breakfast of english muffins and berries.  

We started the day at Beacon Hill Park.  Parking today was easy!  The park was so beautiful!  I really loved it!  Seriously one of the nicest parks I've been to.  Flowers and ponds and beautiful trails everywhere.  Peacocks were wandering around and tonnes of ducks and other animals.  

Owen named these guys Gerry and Gerald.

Check out the sculpture behind the kids!

Check out the turtles!

Ducks, ducks everywhere!

This one really captures how beautiful the park is!

There were tonnes of heron nests up in this tree.  At one point a bit hawk or something went by and they all started squacking at once and made a huge racket!

We then arrived at Beacon Hill Children's Park which is basically a small petting zoo.  The peacocks were putting on a nice show!

We were there at park opening so we got to see the goat stampede!  This is when they open the gate from the barn where the goats spend the night and let them down into the pen at the petting zoo and they run full speed!  Haha!

The kids had a great time at the petting zoo!  Here are a lot of goat pictures because I couldn't choose!

This is my favourite picture of the day!  Haha!

The goats would climb right onto your backs.  Here's Anna trying to get a goat to go on her back!

Here is me with a goat on my back!  😂

Finally, Annie got the goats to climb on her back!

After that we walked to the part of the park where you could see the ocean and a great mountain view!

We found one of the largest totem poles in the world!

Then we moved Big Chonker (Did I mention that Owen named our huge GMC Yukon rental vehicle Bit Chonker?) closer to where our whale watching tour was going to be leaving from.  We had amazing fish and chips at a little place in the harbour very close to our boat tour location.

I had no idea how much I was ordering when I got food for everyone and it turned out the pieces of fish were humungus!  I thought for sure it we would have tonnes of leftovers but we ate almost every single bite! 

We then walked over to our whale watching tour.  I booked with this company because they have a photographer on board who takes photos during the tour and then they send them to you.  This way you can put your phone down and enjoy the whales rather than trying to get a good shot!  I thought this was amazing!  So all of the whale pictures (with the logos on them) were the photos we got after the tour.

The kids were the only kids on the boat and the staff was amazing with them.  Before we even left they gave the kids these Prince of Whales Sunglasses!

We've off!

We came prepared so we could sit on the top deck.  Warm and cozy!

Sitting at the back of the boat while we are off to find some whales!

Free hot chocolate on board to stay cozy!

This was a long tour.  About 4.5 hours on the boat.  So distractions while we tried to find whales were important!

Whale pics are out of order below but after we were done with the whales and were on the way back the staff told the kids they could go drive the boat.  They stayed up there with the captain for about 45 minutes and he showed them how the navigation tools worked and let them steer!  Joel had a headache and decided to stay down on the lower deck.

Here are some of the pictures we got sent to us after!

Sea Lions

Bald Eagle

The first humpback whale we saw.  We watched this guy for about 20 minutes. He was very random, popping up far away from the boat every time he went under.  We eventually left this guy to go to 2 other whales that weren't too far away and they were much easier to track.  There aren't any real ways to track these whales other than experience for the boat drivers.  And all of the tour companies work together and have an app where they enter when they have asightingg so the other drivers in the area can see as well so they all have the best chance of seeing whales.

This is a seal.

Or maybe this is a seal?  I can't remember!  Haha!

Sea lions.

Sea lion

The other 2 humpback whales we saw gave us a really good show!  We probably watched them for 30-45 minutes!  Pictures never do it justice!

We also saw lots of porpoises (sort of like dolphins) while we were out and about.. This is the path we travelled.

We grabbed a very quick piece of pizza because we had one more stop before the day was done and that was at an escape room.  We got very close to escaping but not quite.  Honestly Trev and I have done many escape rooms and I'd rate this one at the bottom of the pile for sure.  We were pretty disappointed.  The kids had nothing to compare it to though and they thought it was cool!

Here's a video of the whale giving us one last wave goodbye just before we were going to head out!

Tomorrow we are mainly just driving to Whistler.  There probably won't be too much to report.  The weather is also turning crappy for the foreseeable future!  I really hope it's somewhat wrong as it will be so disappointing to spend the next 5 or 6 days driving through mountains we can't see because of rain/fog/clouds!  Probability of precipitation is pretty high though so I expect we will definitely get quite a bit of rain.  I think our shorts/dresses are going to end up staying in our bags the whole trip.