Victoria

Victoria, not Vancouver, is the capital city of the Province of BC and the provincial parliament is there. It is a beautiful city but arguably less spectacular than Vancouver itself.

After posting my few lines yesterday I went out of the bedroom and as I paused at the top of the stairs and looked through the window of the other bedroom I realised that it was snowing hard. Suddenly, getting up at 5 was no hardship. Outside the world was transformed, so was I. Kevin had to remind me that everyone else in the neighbourhood was still asleep.

The snow, still falling hard, did not make an easy drive over to Lori's and we did fear that the ferries might not be running.
As we neared Tsawassen however, the snow had lessened. The sea crossing to Vancouver Island's Swartz Bay takes an hour and a half, so very close to the same as the crossing from Dover to Calais. But the journey itself is very different. There is so much to see, islands with houses and beautiful coastline. It certainly doesn't need to be lost time.

When we arrived on VI, it was raining heavily. We drove out to the Goldstream Provincial Park where we were meeting with the coordinator to discuss programming strategies. We turned off the highway at the sign pointing towards the Nature House. How foolish. We were on a truly scary one-car road winding upwards. Jo and I, in the back of the car, tried to keep our gasps of horror between ourselves so as not to distract Lori as we looked down over plunging and unprotected drops. And yet there were evenly spaced houses going up, houses whose numbering was in no way matching the one we were looking for.

If we thought our mystery tour upwards was frightening, coming down was white knuckle stuff.
The correct way to the Nature House turned out to be down the road that said 'No Public Access'.

I feel that I am using superlative adjectives like 'breathtaking', 'spectacular' and 'awe-inspiring' too often when I describe the scenery around here, but the truth is not that I am exaggerating, just that I have insufficient adjectives to adequately describe the beauty of where I have come to live.

Goldstream Park was no exception. We sat in armchairs around a log fire as we shared ideas. Outside, in spite of the teeming rain, the landscape just made me stop and stare, mouth open. Here, the salmon run is the focus of an important part of the educational programmes and the previous year's run had been upset by a late start. But whilst a late start may affect fishing, to the educators here it meant increased media coverage.

Presenting information about both history and natural history is called interpretation in Canada, and the family of interpreters is extended, but most members know one another. There is even an overlap between Canada and the US in this field.

We went into Victoria for lunch and met another member of the family. Then on to Victoria Museum for the final day of an exhibition that overlaps one of our own programmes. It was interesting, but lacked the wow factor we were hoping for. The museum itself overlooks the parliamentary buildings that I see so often on the local TV News.

The weather - I presume - caused a power cut and we were all turned out a little early and so the knock-on effect was that we arrived a little early at the restaurant we we were meeting more members of the Interpretation family for dinner. This too had been closed, we again assumed by something weather related, so we had to wait for the others to arrive before finding somewhere else to eat.

Finally on the last ferry of the day we were all fairly exhausted, but it sailed on time. Not far from the destination however, the wind suddenly whipped up with the effect that at the time we were supposed to land, we were all on the car deck but the ship was unable to dock. Relief when the cars started to move.

I was disappointed to find that the morning's snow had disappeared, but relieved that our power had been restored after a cut earlier in the evening.

It was a good day but egads was I tired.