My only ventures beyond the United States have been to Victoria and Vancouver in British Columbia, Canada. I visited them in 1999 and returned to Victoria in 2005 and 2008. Wendy and I traveled to Victoria from the Olympic Peninsula for our honeymoon in 2016, taking a rental car with us on the Black Ball Ferry Line’s M.V. Coho from Port Angeles, Washington.
The Coho was built in 1959 and has transported more than 26 million passengers and over 7 million vehicles. But for this return to Victoria, I opted to switch over to the passenger-only Victoria Clipper V, which provides direct service between Victoria and Seattle. I didn’t feel like driving to the north end of the Olympic Peninsula for the Coho, which rocked enough to make Wendy queasy on our honeymoon. In past years, I had ridden the MV Victoria Clipper I, a high-speed catamaran that launched in 1986, and I figured that would be a nice change from how we’d travelled to Victoria a decade earlier.
The 296-passenger Clipper I transported over eight million passengers over its 30 years of service, but in 2018 it was replaced by the larger and more fuel efficient Clipper V, which can haul up to 525 passengers. I reserved seats in the upper deck’s Vista class, ensuring Wendy would have an unobstructed view of the horizon.
The crossings went fine, but in retrospect I wish I had planned things differently for this part of the trip. On our honeymoon, having a car made it simple to drive to Butchart Gardens and get around town. This time we were mostly confined to downtown, and we had already seen Butchart Gardens, Beacon Hill Park, Craigdarroch Castle, and the Royal British Columbia Museum on our honeymoon, so there were fewer novelties left for Wendy to enjoy.
Some tourists enjoy riding in seaplanes and going whale watching, but neither interested us. I’d been treated to a flight on an old De Havilland seaplane for my birthday in 1999, which was memorable but quite loud and cramped. In hindsight, we would have been satisfied with two instead of four nights in Victoria.
Upon arrival, we checked our bags at the ferry building until our hotel room would be ready in the afternoon. I then set course overland for The Old Spaghetti Factory, a Canadian chain that inspired the now-defunct Spaghetti Warehouses in the USA. I loved enjoying good spaghetti and salad with delicious sourdough bread, almost a decade after the Spaghetti Warehouse in Tulsa shut down.
I was thankful that Wendy discovered their Cranberry Spinach Salad, hold the Goat Cheese, as that meant she was willing to return two additional times to indulge my desire to have as much of that delicious food as possible, given that I am unlikely to ever return to Victoria.
After filling up at the Factory we walked over to Thunderbird Park, where totem poles were erected in 1940 to preserve some of the region’s deteriorating Aboriginal art. Carvers have maintained and replaced the poles ever since.
During Fall Break in 2023, I had taken Wendy to the Doll Cradle in Shawnee, Kansas, where she purchased a Northwest Coast Native American Barbie from 1999. The doll’s outfit reminded her of the native art we had seen in Victoria on our honeymoon. She spent a couple of weeks painstakingly re-rooting that vintage doll’s hair, dealing with a split in the head and oozing glue that had to be remediated. Wendy brought that favorite Barbie with us to Victoria for our tenth anniversary.
We walked up to Government Street for some shopping, and we browsed Munro’s Books, which since 1984 has occupied a neoclassical 1909 building designed by Thomas Hooper for the Royal Bank of Canada.
Its 24 foot high coffered ceiling resembles that of the porch of the library of Ephesus built by the Romans in the 100s CE.
I purchased a paperback copy of If an Egyptian Cannot Speak English there, which had won several awards and been selected as a Best Book of 2022 by several publications. However, I found it a first novel that was needlessly disjointed and confusing, and I abandoned it before we left Canada.
We walked around The Empress Hotel, where Wendy had admired roses on our honeymoon. There were some roses again this time, but not at their peak. However, the plantings were still quite beautiful. I was glad to see that Surfacing is still being maintained. It is a four-by-six meter garden sculpture of a mother and baby orca formed from almost 10,000 Alternanthera, Santolina, and Fistula plants.
We walked to the Bay Centre mall on another day. It is always interesting to see how malls are faring these days. Oklahoma City’s Penn Square and Tulsa’s Woodland Hills malls are still thriving, while Bartlesville’s Washington Park has a smattering of local vendors and no remaining anchor stores that connect with its interior, and many other malls have been abandoned or demolished.
I figured Bay Centre might be struggling, given that it opened in 1989 with an Eaton’s that later became a Sears Canada, and finally The Bay. The Bay was the last gasp of the venerable Hudson’s Bay Company, founded in 1670 and until its liquidation in 2025 the oldest company in North America. It fell victim to changing times and all-too-typical private equity financial shenanigans.
The mall was still open, although the multi-level space along Government Street that was once The Bay was empty. The food court was unappealing, while there were local stores in a couple of the larger spaces.
We were again staying at the Magnolia Hotel, where I had ensured we would have a view of the Parliament building on the Inner Harbour.
On July 1, we could see the crowds for Canada Day on the lawn for local musical performances, with various food booths and trucks lined up along Belleville Street.
We could hear the music from our hotel room, although we didn’t care for much of it. I did enjoy the version of La Roux’s Bulletproof by Covers in a Dangerous Time, and I also liked a remix by GAMPER & DADONI. However, bear in mind that I’m attracted by the music and oblivious to the lyrics, unlike Wendy, who can recite lyrics to countless songs, quote verbatim from her favorite movies, etc.
We browsed the food offerings along Belleville Street, but we ended up back at The Old Spaghetti Factory. Our hopes of seeing the Canada Day fireworks from our hotel room were for naught, as they were set off farther north. We could only see diffuse blooms of reflected light on a nearby tall building.
Another day we walked down to the dock at The Empress hotel to ride one of the Victoria Harbour Ferry pickle boats to Point Ellice House. The Hobbis family initiated the ferry service in 1990 with two boats, and it now has 15 passenger vessels offering water taxi hops about the Inner Harbour and Gorge. Captain Kato made an excellent approach to pick us up.
Wendy shot a video of the interior of the pickle boat as we prepared to set off north.
I knew it was the simplest way for us to travel to Point Ellice House, with us passing under the Johnson Street bascule bridge into the Upper Harbour, which is far more industrial than the touristy Inner Harbour.
Kato told us how the Inner Harbour was once quite industrial as well, and we passed a Ralmax barge which transports cement components from Vancouver to Victoria. He explained its operation and how Ralmax bought a majority stake in the Victoria Harbour Ferry in 2020, so its owner now gets to watch his fleet of tiny ferries zipping around the harbour along with his lumbering barges; Barry Hobbis retired from running the ferry in 2022.
We passed under the Bay Street Bridge, which is particularly sturdy, as it replaced the Point Ellice Bridge that collapsed in 1896 under the weight of an overloaded streetcar. 55 people died in that accident, one of the worst transit disasters in British Columbia.
The old house with its beautiful grounds is a little oasis, with large trees screening it from the noisy industrial areas around it. You walk up from the dock to cross a beautiful back lawn.
Back in 1999, I had enjoyed tea on that lawn with delicious cucumber sandwiches, but they no longer offer that amenity. The home was constructed in 1861-1862 for Catherine and Charles Wallace. Peter and Caroline O’Reilly took it over in 1867, and they added a wing in the late 1800s. The family lived there until 1975 when it was sold to the province of British Columbia.
The house is like a time capsule with thousands of original items, but the province has struggled to keep it running. Various organizations have operated it on its behalf, and in January 2024 the Métis Nation British Columbia took over management. The ferry folks weren’t even sure the house would be open, but I had confirmed that we could access it.
As we began our self-guided tour, Wendy and I were unaware that the Métis Nation had taken it over, but we noticed how the signage tastefully acknowledged the colonial history of the home and its owners, with Peter O’Reilly having been an Indian Reserve Commissioner who largely shirked his duties and avoided meeting with First Nations leaders. As I had expected, Wendy enjoyed the grounds more than the house itself.
After touring the house and grounds and browsing the gift shop in the old carriage house, we walked down to the dock at the Selkirk Water. I called the ferry company on my cell phone, and while we waited to be picked up, a rental hot tub boat floated by.
The bows of those boats have onboard stoves heated by compressed logs.
One of the ferries transported us back to The Empress, passing another pickle boat on the way.
Some summers the company has a choreographed Water Ballet of the cute little craft.
On our way back to the Inner Harbour, we also saw folks on stand up paddleboards and passed seaplanes. A few days later, we’d see and hear seaplanes taking off on Lake Union in Seattle.
We tried the hotel’s room service breakfast on Day 5, but on Day 6 we had breakfast at Frankie’s Modern Diner, where we had enjoyed a dinner. On Day 7 we breakfasted at a local branch of Cora’s, where I ordered the 1990’s Harvest with a cinnamon bun dipped in French toast batter, a scrambled egg, bacon, and an impressive amount of fresh fruit. We enjoyed Cora’s enough to dine there again on our final day in Victoria.
We woke up on July 4, 2026, our nation’s semiquincentennial, in another country, but the Victoria Clipper V would remedy that. However, it didn’t depart for Seattle until 5 p.m., so after checking our bags at the ferry building we walked to the public library to relax and read. Then we boarded the clipper so that we could celebrate our country’s 250th birthday with a tremendous fireworks show at Lake Union, which I’ll share in the next and final post from our anniversary trip.
Meador Manor 