Vacation Recap: Vancouver Island

Vancouver Island is a large, mountainous island off the western coast of British Columbia. (Random trivia to underscore just how large it is: Vancouver Island is 12,709 square miles in area. Okinawa, where I lived for 1½ years: 463 square miles. Washington, D.C.: 68 square miles.)

Getting There

The city of Victoria, on the southern end of Vancouver Island, is the provincial capital of British Columbia. It’s also rather a pain to get to. In previous trips we’ve tried to plot out daytrips from Vancouver to Victoria, but we’ve never been able to make it work (perhaps short of taking a seaplane).

So, the two times we’ve made it to Victoria, we’ve made it a separate leg of the trip — going from Vancouver to Victoria to Seattle, rather than back to Vancouver. The itinerary, from downtown Vancouver:

• Skytrain (Canada Line) to Bridgeport Station
• Translink 520 bus to Tsawwassen Ferry Terminal
• BC Ferries to Swartz Bay, Vancouver Island
• BC Transit bus 70 or 72 from Swartz Bay to downtown Victoria (end of the line)

It’s kind of an undertaking.

(If you know of a better way to do this, please tell me.)

Day 1

• Breakfast in Vancouver, then the Grand Adventure (outlined above) to get to Victoria. Rob suggested that the ferry experience was something akin to Amtrak-meets-cruise ship.
• Hotel: Stayed at the Inn at Laurel Point during our time in Victoria. The location was convenient and the price fairly reasonable. We stayed in what was, I think, an older wing of the hotel, so the rooms weren’t quite as nice (though we still had a harbor view).
• Leisurely evening wanderings around downtown Victoria, including dinner at the wharf-side Red Fish, Blue Fish (the tacones are a little weird, but the battered fish is stellar) and book shopping at Munro’s Books. We also came across a couple of promising comic book stores, but, alas, they’d already closed for the night.

Day 2

• Rented a car — a wholly impractical, bright red Fiat 500 — for a daytrip out of town.
• Breakfast at the Dutch Bakery before heading out. The front is a bakery storefront, and the back is a very basic diner restaurant. Their Danish pastry was amazing — warm, flaky, flavorful — putting every stale, flattened conference Danish to shame.
• Drove out to Juan de Fuca Provincial Park, about an hour west of Victoria. The Juan de Fuca Strait runs between this part of Vancouver Island and the Olympic Peninsula of Washington state. We were so close, we could see across the strait to Washington and, at one point, even picked up Seattle radio stations and a decent AT&T cellphone signal.
• The Marine Trail through Juan de Fuca Provincial Park runs for a fairly rugged 47 kilometers. Rob selected two segments to explore for this trip: from the Juan de Fuca trailhead to Mystic Beach (near the eastern end of the park), and then (much shorter) from the Botanical Bay trailhead at the western end of the park to Botany Bay.
• The Mystic Beach hike was gorgeous, through a temperate rainforest, but quite nerve-wracking. The ground was quite muddy-slick in inconvenient, hilly places (both Rob and I took spills, and Rob sprained a finger). And we were on an island with relatively large populations of black bears and cougars (both recently sighted in the park) and had arrived unprepared, without bear bells or anything like that. (It didn’t help, walking back, when we passed a hiker who pointed out a cluster of tree stumps to her companions and said, “And here’s where the bear cornered us…”) So we talked loudly and constantly about inane things in an attempt to signal our presence, so as not to startle any nearby wildlife. But the payoff was pretty fantastic.
• Drove another hour or so to Port Renfrew (near the western end of the park) for a late lunch at Coastal Kitchen. Their fish and chips were both gianormous and delicious.
• Drove to the Botanical Beach trailhead and took the (relatively short, very gentle) trail down to Botany Bay, where we clambered over jagged rocks and watched the tide slowly come in. One of the notable things about Botany Bay (and nearby Botanical Beach) is the preponderance of tide pools, where plant life can grow and sea life can become temporarily stranded when the tide changes.
• Drove back to Victoria for dinner at Zambri’s, an Italian restaurant. We dined there during our honeymoon, and I was eager to return. (We’d found it, in the pre-Yelp, pre-iPhone era, via a recommendation in a Vancouver magazine “Best of” issue.) The restaurant had moved from a cozy strip mall location to a fancy new glassed-in building. It has a slightly posher feel, but the food is still fantastic and the service very friendly (despite our muddy jeans and hiking boots).

Day 3

• Breakfast at Aura, the restaurant in our hotel. The food wasn’t bad and the view was quite nice, but in all, rather overpriced (as one might expect from a hotel restaurant).
• Boarded the Victoria Clipper ferry for a 2½-hour ride to Seattle. Checking in is a bit annoying — it’s one line after another, from check-in to U.S. Customs, to the holding room to, finally, boarding. And there were so many more sales pitches for their gift shop, duty free items and vacation packages than there were the last time we rode this ferry (five years ago). Still, it’s a fairly fast, convenient way to get back. We boarded the ferry in Victoria right near our hotel, and we disembarked in Seattle at Pier 69, right by the new Olympic Sculpture Park and not too far from Pike Place Market.
• In Seattle, we headed first to a post office in the Queen Anne neighborhood to mail home souvenirs and colder-weather dirty clothes, hit Pagliacci for a delicious “Goat Cheese Primo” pizza, then boarded the light rail to the airport for our flight to Las Vegas.

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