Ireland day 0969. Friday 24 May 2024- Victoria 2

Today’s summary	Spent the whole day walking Victoria town centre. Had a look at a yachting flotilla then went for lunch at Macciato Caffe. Next, went to MEC to buy some hiking gloves and on to the Maritime museum for a quick look round. Spent most of the rest of the afternoon in the Royal BC museum and then finished off with dinner at Finns. Really enjoyed it.
Today’s weather	Rain overnight but mostly overcast and dry during the day. Light southerly wind. Appx 11c

Today’s overview location (The green mark shows the location of our route)		Close-up location (The orange line shows where we walked) (Click button below to download GPX of today’s walk as recorded, or see interactive map at bottom with elevations corrected): Victoria Potter

Commentary

(Summary blog only. Last full blog was Day 0368).

Usually when we are on holiday we spend most of the time hiking around and climbing things so it’s quite unusual for us to have a day like today, when essentially we just spent the time pottering about in town.

As a treat, we allowed ourselves a lie-in and cup of tea in bed this morning. Once we surfaced properly, we headed out into the town centre (which is only a couple of blocks from the Oswego Hotel, where we are staying).

Our stroll into town was however interrupted by an enthusiastic sailor person who invited us to go and have a look round the flotilla of yachts moored in the city harbour. So we went and spent a few minutes looking at the millions of dollars’ worth of oceangoing machinery moored there – in preparation for, we learned, a 2 day race setting out at the crack of dawn tomorrow.

This unexpected detour set our explorations back by an hour or so, but we weren’t in a hurry so it didn’t really matter.

By this stage we were both really hungry, so made a bee-line for Macciato Caffe for lunch – I had a thing that called itself a biscuit but which was actually a scone, and Val had a focaccia sandwich.

Next on our list to see was the Mountain Equipment Company (MEC) – a huge outdoor sports retailer that I felt sure would have just the pair gloves I was looking for. (I wanted to find some warm gloves that were easy to put on and off and which would be at least semi water resistant, and suitable for the Wicklow mountains. I did manage to get a pair and will look forward to trying them out shortly).

From the MEC, we briefly visited another super expensive sports shop and didn’t buy anything. From there we went to the Maritime Museum, which was quite small but which has an interesting exhibition about the Pacific Coast Trail.

By now we were fully in the swing of museuming, so we headed a couple of blocks down the street to check out the Royal BC Museum. It’s an excellent facility, with very good sections on Natural History (especially the Ice Age) and First Nation languages. But some of the exhibitions on the Western colonisation of British Columbia were closed, in view of recent concerns about how incoming Europeans treated the native residents.

The day was drawing to a close by the time we’d seen everything in the museum – including the Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition (visiting from then Natural History Museum in London) and a major display on Stonehenge. We were both feeling hungry again, so we walked back into town to seek out Finns restaurant – we had wanted to visit yesterday but arrived too late. Victoria is evidently an “early”’city and a lot of restaurants, like Finns, are closed by 9pm. Tonight we got there in time and had excellent seafood dinners.

Well that’s enough for now. I’m feeling surprisingly tired for a day essentially just spent wandering about, so I’m going to call it quits for now and make a cup of tea.

Back tomorrow!

Today’s photos (click to enlarge)


Inspecting the yacht flotilla and trying but failing to look like we know what we are talking about	This was called a “biscuit” but it is clearly actually a scone. Anyway, it tasted pretty good.

Wow – what an amazing rear freewheel! When I got my first racing bike, I was pretty impressed by my 14-28 range but this is 10-52! impressive technological advance	Val checking out the Maritime Museum

Its a different world here	*Fascinating roche moutonée* (glacially-eroded rock) in the middle of Victoria – complete with interesting and geologically accurate information plaque**

Weird fishy-eel thing living in the aquarium section of the Royal BC Museum