Victoria
I'll be honest and say that today wasn't the 'best' day. We still had a good time but I was grumpy and the kids drove us crazy today. A road trip with 3 kids isn't easy and we are all exhausted. Nobody sleeps great at the hotels (especially me), we are dealing with a time change and since we got to our hotel at about 2am on our timezone on the first night we arrived, we are all still quite tired. Add on that being together 24-7 and lots of boring parts of the day and it's easy to get on each other's nerves. But we still had fun today! Here is our adventure!
We had to leave the hotel today at 7:30am. Packing up a hotel room for 5 of us is no small task and we are going to have to get good at it because we are going to be doing it a lot. You need to make sure the right things are in the day bag, nobody forgot anything, kids ate breakfast, convince kids to get dressed so you can pack their pjs, convince kids to brush teeth so you can pack the toothbrushes, get water bottles from the fridge, make sure everyone has masks, etc, etc. etc. It's enough to make me crazy! But we were out waiting for our Uber at 7:25am and he showed up right on time. The Uber driver we had was really friendly and gave us tips about travelling through Alberta the whole ride. He works at the Airport as an interpreter (he said people who get caught doing stuff they shouldn't be doing at airports often conveniently 'can't speak english' to understand what they are in trouble for) so the airport has interpreters there on standby.
We had our first bit of stress when we went to pick up our rental vehicle (which there is a whole backstory on the hassle we had booking that I won't get into). We really needed a big vehicle and there aren't many available and we were concerned we'd show up and they'd say, sorry we have to give you a smaller vehicle. But thankfully that didn't happen and they had our Giant GMC Yukon there ready for us. The issue started when he looked up Trevor's name and found out that he is somehow on a 'Do Not Rent' list. They have him in the system as never returning an Avis car in Flin Flon Manitoba in 2014. This would have been a rental for a work trip. It's obviously an error and Trevor doesn't remember any rental vehicle hassle from that trip. But the guy wouldn't let him rent the car. Thank goodness he allowed us to transfer the rental into my name and Trevor was still allowed to be a driver. I just had the have the agreement in my name. So we were off in our giant SUV/truck (which is super nice and fancy compared to our Dodge Caravan). We had fun playing with the fun features like the sunroof and the hatch which opens when you wave your foot under the bumper (although that maybe caused more hassle than it was worth since Trev accidentally closed the hatch on his head at least 8 times while loading our luggage! Haha!
I had asked the Uber driver if there was anything to do near the ferry terminal because in the end we were going to be quite early. He said, just go up and see if you can switch your reservation! Should be lots of room today on a Tuesday! So we were originally on an 11am ferry but got on the 10am ferry with that trick. I would have just sat around bored for an extra hour so that was a great tip!
Approaching the ferry terminal:
We had packed a picnic lunch and the kids (ALWAYS hungry) dug in the second we got on the boat. Eating lunch at 10:30am set us up for a day of weird eating!
From there we went to the top deck to check out the views! Man was it cold! This was actually great because we are going on a Whale Watching tour tomorrow and getting a quick idea of how cold it will be on the water means I am going to bring a bunch of extra clothes with us.
We went back to the truck and got our hats and gloves.
Going through a passage way.
Eventually we headed inside where it was still warmer. When you look at each of these pictures, picture them peppered with kids poking each other, stealing each other's food, ripping their masks off their face, spraying each other with hand sanitizer, etc. Then picture me running on no sleep trying to stay sane. 😩
It was a 30 minute drive to Victoria. We stopped at the hotel hoping to unpack our room, but they said our room wouldn't be available until 4pm. We headed into town and unfortunately the parking situation was crazy! We drove around in circles for probably a half hour trying to find somewhere to park. Exercise in frustration for sure! Some swear words may have been uttered!
We walked down by the water. I was surprised at how big and busy Victoria was. I was sort of picturing a Manitoulin Island vibe but it's very big cityish. The waterfront isn't quite as scenic as Vancouver's waterfront I found. I think one of the issues today was that we didn't have any 'big' or kid-friendly things to do. The last couple of days we've had the Science Center and Aquarium and Fly Over Canada. Today we just had planned to walk along the water to Fisherman's Wharf and the kids particularly Owen) just could not for the life of him figure out why we would just walk along the waterfront with no particular destination. He was not into it at all.
Very cool tree outside of the Legislature.
Trev doing his favourite pastime, taking time-lapse videos with his phone and Gimble combo!
Anna: Mommy I need you to hold my bag so I can go do gymnastics on the grass!
More of our walk
Finally made it down to Fisherman's Wharf! And guess what! I took my sweatshirt off for the first time. It was a nice, sunny day!
This was my favourite part of the day. All of these restaurants and houses are floating. The row on the right are all private homes and people live here on the water in their floating houses!
Even though it was only 3pm we were all starving so we ate dinner. We ordered pizza down at a cute little restaurant and it was really nice!
The lady told the kids they could refill their pop as many times as they want so the boys had fun making concoctions by mixing different pops together.
The kids were looking at a tiny eel they spotted in the water. We also saw an otter pop up quickly a few times which the kids thought was really fun!
Time to head back to the hotel! We took a water taxi to get us within a 20 minute walk back to the truck.
We walked back though Chinatown on the way home.
This is a cool alley which is super narrow but has shops all along it!
I stopped quickly at a MEC to get myself a warmer sweatshirt for the Whale watching tomorrow. We may have pictured a bit more summery weather when we packed. We all brought 2 sweatshirts and 2 pairs of pants and it's all we've worn! Instead of sweatshirts, I brought light cardigans which I thought would be great with my dresses and skirts (which I don't think I will wear at all!). That wasn't going to cut it for tomorrow. We also stopped at a grocery store to get snacks for the boat tomorrow plus breakfast for the next 2 days.
Finally something the kids wanted to do....hotel pool! They were completely wild at this point. Impossible to get a non blurry photo of these crazy kids!
We spent about an hour with the kids jumping in a million times!
While they swam, I dropped off our laundry and did 2 small loads! I didn't think we'd have to do laundry so quickly but with wearing all our warm gear over and over it got dirty fast. We also had a bit of an issue with Owen only ending up with one pair of pants instead of 2 (long story) and his pants were filthy so it really couldn't wait!
Normally at home the kids go to bed at 8 pm, 8:30 pm and 9 pm but I've been saying lights out at 8pm and they are all fast asleep in about 5 minutes! They have been up early though (the first 2 days they were up at 5am and 6am, probably due partly to the time change and partly due to them sharing beds which doesn't let them get the best sleep). Today I had to wake them up at about 6:45 am though. I think we will let them sleep in tomorrow so hopefully they sleep past 7 am!
Here's the Trevor's camera random shots. I figured out how to make the pictures bigger so hopefully they show up a bit better this time!
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