Easter weekend heralded an unprecedented four whole days off for us, so we loaded up our newly acquired Ortlieb panniers, and headed out to Vancouver Island. The rough route was to cycle down from Nanaimo to Victoria via Salt Spring Island, the main attraction being Victoria, the capital of British Columbia and retirement, and, so my guidebook tells me, a city that is supposed to be more english than England itself. We started out in true Pilbrow fashion, missing our first connecting bus by a whisker, and having a mad peddal to catch the one to the ferry terminal. I won't comment on whose fault this was. hmmmm
Four days-175kms-lots of holiday traffic-a serious lack of maps-and a freezing cold night of test camping our new lite weight tent-later, and we survived to blog...
So I'm new to the whole cycle touring thing, so I didn't really know what to expect. The first day we took the ferry from Vancouver and rode down from Nanaimo to Salt Spring Island, doing something I'll never do again, riding the whole way on a four lane highway as advised by our guidebook, which while it had a large shoulder the whole way and probably was fine safety wise, wasn't the best introduction to cycle touring, to say the least.
The highway did produce one of the only meat pies we've found in Canada, which, heated up in the microwave, tin pie shell, gladwrap and all, well didn't really redeem the highway experience. Yeah, that was probably the highlight of that leg.
We did finally escape the highway, and took the ferry to Salt Spring Island.
Salt Spring island, is a kind of Waihike meets pine forrest, home to many artists and the famous Salt Spring island mussels (which frankly, failed to impress given their sheer lack of size compared to nz mussels). Very cute, and much quieter and more scenic riding, the highlight being a fabulously long descent (well really, all the downhills were fabulous for me), after a very steep hill, down to the cutest little church which was open to people to look around in. For some reason there seemed to be a rash of cute churches in Salt Spring.
We spent the night on Salt Spring, camping in our new lite weight tent, 1.5 kg...
I didn't have a great night sleep... to be honest I'm not sure if it was because I was too cold, or because I kept waking up thinking how perfect our site was, perched on the edge of a provincial park, with no other campers around, for hungry bears waking up out of hibernation (which they are currently doing), to come and investigate. I don't think there are any bears on Salt Spring, but as they do swim I avoided asking any locals in case the answer was affirmative (I have a thing about bears in case you hadn't picked that up...brought on I think by being read gruesome bear attack stories as a young impressionable child, by some thoughtless primary school teacher). We had a slightly mad end to Salt Spring island as we leisurely cruised into the harbour for our connecting ferry back to the mainland (island mainland that is), and had a frantic five minute race with the ferry as it was coming in... consulting the schedule in my bag would have been far too organised! There's a pattern here...
This second day of cycling took in the world famous Butchart Gardens, which seemed appropriate to take in given that we were visiting the proper little city of Victoria. The gardens were absolutely stunning, if somewhat mislead in the order of gardens they show you, going from stunning to lovely to average, to a non-existant rose garden pruned back for the season.
The day also introduced us to the joys of Victoria's cycleways... all flat, all off road (well mainly) taking us right downtown to about 100 m away from our hotel ... pure bliss!! Well done Victoria!
Love, love, loved Victoria! Apparently it was in a recession when it was in fashion to demolish all the lovely old buildings that every city now lords, and install various modern buildings that date within a year or two, so Victoria is a lovely little city full of beautiful old buildings, funky little botiques, many places to wine, dine and, most importantly, to do high tea. We stayed at the Strathcona hotel which was built in 1913, attached to which was a mammoth english pub called the Sticky Wicket, which had the lovely type of stodgy pub food and beer one needs after biking 130 km to get there.
We ate a lot, did the high tea thing in the cutest, kitschy tea rooms, the James Bay Tearooms, which still displayed photos of Diana and Charles in wedding day regalia, along with every other royal you didn't want to know about (Liz you would have loved it!).
Lance drinking his tea ever so properly...
Unfortunately Victoria didn't really turn on the weather on that third day, well until 5pm that night when we had just given up on wandering around in the rain sightseeing.
Some of the sights of Victoria...
The beautiful 'old lady of Victoria'...the Fairmont Empress Hotel, which apparently does a fabulous high tea, with silver everything and waiters in tails and all...but which at $80 a pop, was substituted for the James Bay.
There were, true to BC form, a lot of homeless people around, probably something to do with those free one way tickets Vancouver City was rumored to be handing out to them to get them out of the way in time for the Olympics. This one was impressively belting out some Jesus song in the rain, with quite the array of moves...
We then cycled out to the ferry to Vancouver on the Monday...via that brilliant cycle network which takes you past all sorts of fun things, like pig farms, cyclists taking their dogs for rides, that kind of thing...
