Still in Victoria

Where else can you travel for 25 hours by car, 2 planes, 3 buses and a ferry and still be in Victoria? Well, actually, we are in Victoria Canada, though getting here was not without it's hassles for once.

Our flight to Sydney went without a hitch, but once in Sydney it all went a bit off the rails. Security pulled Mandy's hand luggage off for a second look, even though it was fine in Melbourne. Couldn't find anything of course, but they took objection to the copha that they saw in her bag during the inspection. When we protested that it wasn't on any banned list, they said that it might melt if it got hot. So I asked if they were going to confiscate everybody's chocolate, but they didn't see the funny side of it. Honestly, I think that they must surgically remove the funny bone from security guards during their induction. So, sorry Brendan. No chocolate crackles for you this time.

Eventually the guy went back to the machine and rescanned Mandy's bag. Nothing! What he didn't tell her was that he had taken her handbag out of her backpack to scan that separately, so she picked up her backpack and off we headed to the gate. Now we can add 'no brains' to the 'no humour'. Inside we found that our flight had been delayed an hour, so I pulled out my phone to check the flight information, and Mandy decided to do the same, only to find that her handbag, phone, credit cards and goodness knows what else was missing, All right, time to panic, and we hadn't even got through Sydney. We both ran all the way back through the terminal against the flow, which is always fun, and asked about the handbag, and luckily there it was on the bench.
"There it is" Mandy said.
"What does it look like?" said the guy.
"It's that one there".
"Can you describe it?"
So after telling him the colour and the size of the bag in his hand, he finally asked if it looked like 'this'.
Eventually, after being reunited with the handbag, and the iPhone charger bag that Mandy also noticed on the bench that they must have also taken out, and filling out lots of forms to keep them amused, we headed back to the gate.

Our flight was delayed for 'routine maintenance' that they somehow realised needed to be done now, even though the plane had been sitting on the tarmac all night. We shouldn't complain though. It looked like they were emptying the toilets, so we thought that might be a wise use of time.

Eventually departed an hour and a half late, so everybody on the plane was anxious. "Don't worry" we were told. "There's 50 of you with connections this morning." So that made it all ok. It's much better than just 2 people missing their connections.

We were all organised on arrival to hot foot it off the plane and run for our connection, but when it came to disembark, my bag had gone out of the overhead locker. "We'll look when everybody gets off", she kindly said. Of course it wasn't there, but there was a jacket down the back on the other side. "Is that yours?" she asked hopefully.

Finally a girl arrived back at the plane door with my bag in hand. Her dad had carried it off, and wasn't game to bring it back himself. Everything seemed to be inside, so off we ran for customs and baggage collection. Being early on a Saturday morning here, the queues were really short, unlike Sydney (see the theme here?), and our bags were really quick, so we finally made our connecting bus with about 10 minutes to spare. Mind you the security strap on my suitcase had gone missing too. Seems that every thing was still inside, but it was just the last in a long list of challenges for the day.

Still the old adage about the more organised you are the more you can get over obstacles seemed to be true, and we finally found ourselves on the bus bound for Victoria. That bus took us to another bus, which drove us on to the ferry for a gorgeous 2 hour cruise across to Vancouver Island. We sat up on deck in the warm sunshine, watched the islands pass us by, and tried to forget the last 24 hours. Just lovely.

Finally on the other side, the bus took us downtown, and dropped us off right near the motel in the early afternoon. Which brings us to Victoria. Discovered by, you guessed it - Captain James Cook, on his next voyage after bumping into Australia, and named after the Queen (well, what wasn't), it was and still is the capital of the Canadian province of British Columbia. It used to be the main commercial centre of the British presence west of the Rockies until the new train line strangely couldn't cross the water, and terminated at a little settlement on the mainland called Vancouver.

After checking in, we took our obligatory long walk to reset our body clocks, and try to stay awake. Wandered for miles on walking tracks around the shoreline looking at the boats, yachts, canoes and seaplanes, through the various outdoor markets, and past endless restaurants and cafes. It really is a great place to visit on an early summer's day.

An early dinner, when we couldn't stretch it out any longer. Went to the 'Sticky Wicket' cricket themed pub, as we thought that might be fun, but completely forget that putting a sign outside doesn't change anything except the name. Pretty sure the waitresses wouldn't have known the first thing about cricket, so we sat there and watched the baseball instead while we ate dinner.

Ah Canada. So much to like. If it wasn't for some concessions to their southern neighbours, it would be ideal. They have embraced metric and plastic banknotes. They are charming and friendly. They have fences, footpaths and nature strips. It's clean and efficient. If only they added their taxes into their displayed prices it would be perfect. They don't even stamp the value on all of their coins. Means that tourists like us stand trying to ready the right coins, only to find that once they add in the tax you need to fumble for yet more. The lady at the donut van tried to convince us that the $10 notes were not only plastic (she wasn't impressed at Australia for introducing them either), but manufactured to smell like maple syrup. Now that would be a neat trick. Just hope they don't manufacture the $20 note to smell like salmon.