Road trip : Victoria

Yesterday we arrived at the wonderful Abbeymoore B&B (see left) in Victoria on Vancouver Island. After so long on the prairie, I really can't express how good it was getting out on the water on the boat that brought us across from Vancouver!

The ferry took about 90 minutes, half of which was open water in the channel between the island and the mainland and the other half was negotiated through an inlet. This second part of the trip was particularly stunning with lush green land meeting the water, blue skies and seals swimming alongside the boat, it reminded me a bit of Cornwall, just a bit more tropical!

Coming over to Vancouver Island has made us appreciate the vastness of Canada even more. The country is so enormous that they have an island more or less the size of the UK bolted on as an after thought! Clearly we've been here too long because we have adopted the same attitude as North Americans visiting Britain, which is we'll do the whole thing in 6 days, it's not that big!

So tomorrow, we're moving on to Ucluelet, from where we'll also visit Toffino, but back to Victoria for a moment...

We have thoroughly enjoyed our brief stop here. The town is small enough to wander round in a day and full of charm with a lovely colonial feel to it. On the advice of the B&B owners we had lunch at the excellent Red Fish Blue Fish on the quay. Its a fish and chip restaurant operating out of two ISO containers with an almost constantly long queue of people lining up for food. (see photo below) I had two spicy pacific fish tacones, which were amazing!

The B&B has also been excellent. We picked it because it was the number one rated guest house on Tripadvisor and we certainly haven't been disappointed! Ian & Anne are charming hosts, the room is stunning and our breakfast this morning was delicious - in fact, my only complaint was that Ian cooking his own supper tonight smelt so good that it forced us to go out and find dinner!

So tomorrow we will collect our hire car for the 4 hour drive up island to Ucluelet, where we expect the weather to be overcast and damp!