Travel By Water

Sunday morning we arose early and caught the Port Angeles Black Ball Line Ferry, the Coho, to Victoria BC.  I should chime in at this point and say that although we used the controversial ArriveCAN app to tell the Canadian government about our travel plans and COVID status, at no point during our travels did anyone ask to see the QR code the app produced for our clearance credentials.  ArriveCAN apparently has the Canadian media and regional boarder folks in a tizzy; using it a day or two before we actually left was irksome, but not the travel deterring angst-fest it's being made out to be—but then again, we weren't just waking up and deciding to drive across the US-Canadian border for High Tea on a whim.

The Child would have loved the Black Ball Ferry because Bing Crosby and the Andrews Sisters sing a 1950's style jingle about it, which the Coho played going into and out of port.  We were incredibly lucky with the weather:  the waters were very calm whenever we were afloat and the temperatures during our visit didn't rise much higher than the mid-eighties.  Along the thirty-mile trip through the Straight of Juan de Fuca, we saw orca whales in the distance.  

Pulling into Victoria, the modern apartment buildings along the shoreline surprised me; it looked like Portland.  I was expecting more castles or old-timey barbarian (not barbaric) splendor.  I mean, it's Canada; a foreign country; and Victoria's a place more English than England—where was the charming peasantry and why were there no ancient, crenelated gun towers or at least a trebuchet or two?  The recording of Bing and the Andrews Sisters was nice, but subconsciously I was expecting a production number out of the Wizard of Oz, like the Winkie Guards' Pike Dance outside the castle of the Wicked Witch of the West.  Then a sea plane took off out of the harbor docks and flew overhead and I spent the next five minutes with the opening credits scene from Fantasy Island in my head.  So there was that. 

When we sailed into the inner harbor, the Empress Hotel came into view.  It looks similar to depictions of Hogwarts School, only with far fewer towers.  Bits of the Parliament Building were also visible, so Victoria was redeemed as a Truly Foreign Place.  

As we debarked from the ferry, we saw the Water Taxies warming up for their semi-regular Water Taxi Ballet.  Not quite a Pike Dance, but still entertaining.  The ballet wasn't set to start for about twenty minutes; Mark suggested I could go take a look at the Parliament Building... and I walked over... and I started taking photographs... completely lost track of time... and missed the ballet in its entirety.  (I was in trouble for that one; it didn't help that our cell phones were confused by being 30 miles away from the US, so no one had been able to reach me while I was snapping pix.)