Damn, Canada, that was way too short

No offense to our sailor friends Jeff and Ann, and Brent and Karen, but as a general proposition sailboats suck.  Sailboats under sail generally have the right-of-way, which they enjoy by tacking slowly back and forth in our path whenever possible.  Begrudgingly, however, we admit that some of them are quite pretty.  Like this one we passed on our way to Brentwood Bay.

Brentwood Bay basically is North Victoria, but when we were in Victoria for the Canada Day Drone and Fireworks Fizzle we didn’t have time to come up by bus.

The reason to go to Brentwood Bay at all, of course, is The Butchart Gardens.  World famous.  Everyone who knew we were going to Victoria said the same thing: “Don’t miss The Butchart Gardens.”  There’s a separate entrance at a dinghy dock in Butchart Cove, so we popped ours down and cruised on in.

In 1904, Bob and Jennie Butchart started digging limestone out of Vancouver Island at Tod Inlet, for use by their cement company.  After exhausting the deposit, Jennie was left with an ugly quarry in her back yard.  Over the years she turned it into what now is a National Historic Site of Canada.

While we highly recommend a visit, don’t go at noon.  Noon is when hundreds of tour buses from Victoria arrive.  Those buses each carry roughly a million slow-moving people who don’t mind stopping wherever they please, even if it’s at the precise spot where we want to stop.  No fun at all, particularly with a small black dog who was at constant risk of a trampling death.  So we punted our first effort and went back at 4.  Much better.

A dogless dinner at The Dining Room after the buses are gone is a great way to cap off a visit to the gardens.

Yesterday was sad and gloomy and rainy, which sucked for the trip around the top of the Saanich Peninsula but was good for extinguishing the wildfire that’s been raging just west of us.

Incidentally, we’ve now learned that smoke from the Old Man Lake Fire is responsible for the almost-apocalyptic sunset in our last post.  So there’s the proverbial silver-lining, we suppose.

We also passed another photo-worthy sailboat, this one with crazy people dangling off the bowsprit.

Anyway, we made it to Sidney.  Sidney is our last stop in Canada this year, thanks to the CDC morons who made a stupid rule about dogs and then waited to reverse that stupid rule until it was too late to help us.  Grrr.  The Port Sidney Marina, however, is fabulous.  Excellent dockhands.  Wide fairways.  Concrete docks.  Hanging flowers that probably are quite stunning in sunlight but we’ll never know for certain.

This morning, more rain.  Fortunately, we carry two huge umbrellas on board for this very situation.  So off we went to walk around town.  Unfortunately, “It looks like the rain is over so let’s not take the umbrellas” proves foolish every stinking time.  But things dried up a bit later and the weather is trending in the right direction.

Dana even bonded with Janet—of Janet’s Special Teas—who gave us a literal tea spoon to go with our Christmas tea.

Here’s a bonus mural we forgot to include before we sent the emails out.  It depicts the moment before terrified natives who should’ve stayed home were dashed into pieces.  All the poor dude in the waffle-cone hat could do was point.

So that’s it for Canada this summer.  Somewhat sadly, tomorrow we head back to the US of A.