This was our last stop before we arrived back at Seattle.  The ship got into port around 6:30 PM and we were only going to be here for 4 1/2 hours.  Again, they said they were going to pull in at 7:30 PM but arrived an hour early so we missed the docking AGAIN   (We were stuffing our faces for our last dinner on the ship).  Our last change to see the ship dock will be in Seattle at 7:00 AM tomorrow.  Hopefully we won’t miss that one.

When we got off the ship we passed thru this building

Welcome to Canada

to get to the parking lot.  I figured they’d want to see our passports.  Nope.

The day before we arrived, we went to an informational meeting about Victoria and we were told it is about a 30 minute walk into town but we would be better off hopping on one of the forms of transportation provided so we could have every minute to explore the town.  There were a few ways to get into town.  You could walk, take a cab, go by horse-drawn carriage

Horsey ride into town

or by bus.  We chose bus.  So we paid our $26 (which was the cheapest way into town besides our feet), and got on our double-decker bus

Us on bus

I hope the guy behind us wasn’t in the Witness Protection program…I think I just blew his cover.  We thought the bus was going to stop at a few spots, maybe let us on and off a few times but it just drove to the center of town and dumped us.  The driver said a bus would be at that spot every 15 minutes and the last one would be at 11:00.  So everyone piled off and we just started walking.  Of course they dropped us by all the shops.  Is that all these people think us tourist do is shop and spend money?  Well, I guess most of them do, we are just the exception to the rule.  So where did we head off to?  Back to the water of course 

We did see a few things as we strolled along.  We saw the Parliament building

Parliament building

This building was supposed to be beautiful at night because it was all lit up.  Then we saw this whale,

whale made of plants

pretty good use of greenery.  We also saw this building.

Building going up or coming down?

The inside was all gutted out and the walls were propped up with those beams.  I couldn’t tell if they were taking it down or going to rebuild with the existing walls.

As we got closer to the water we saw this

Orca made of mosaics

Almost looks like it is glowing, doesn’t it?  There was another Canada sign.

I’m not really sure of the significance behind that but people were lining up to take a picture of it.  We saw a boat we could rent

Boat in the harbor

and a little walkway around the harbor that we checked out.  After that, we were pretty much done sight-seeing.  So we headed back to the bus stop.  The bus was waiting there for us.  We were the first people on board.  I think we surprised them on how short of a walk about we had.  We got our seats on the top of the bus, the front row and waited for the ride back.  We had a nice little chat with an older couple who sat down next to us (by older I mean, pretty close to our age).  Finally the bus took off and took us back to the ship.  Again I had our passports in hand but again, no one wanted to see them.  We did have to show our room key to security to get into the gate to get to the ship so I guess that is how they keep the riffraff out.

We stopped and got a nightcap before we headed up to our stateroom.  The ship was leaving close to midnight and that was much too late for us “old” people to stay up so we hit the hay.  As we made our final trip back to the room we could see everyone was ready for departure the next day.

Bye Bye till next time

Our final stop would be back at Seattle!