This morning we were up early for the complimentary hotel breakfast, and headed out to rent bikes. We were on a mission to ride over to Clover Point to watch the start of the Swiftsure regatta. The bike rental place is just across the street from the bus depot, so while we were there, Aaron bought tickets out to Butchart Gardens for later in the day.

Helmets on, we pedalled across Beacon Hill park. Green waving grass, small flowers, big trees, gentle hills, playgrounds, ponds, it was beautiful. We popped out of the park and into a view of the ocean with snow-capped mountains across the straits, and an army of white sails. I can't imagine how they had room to navigate, all those sailboats. We rode along the water to a convenient lookout point, just up the hill from the regatta's pancake breakfast tents. I'd brought my book, and settled happily with the bikes while Aaron strode off with the camera. A lot of other people had come out to watch the start of the race, but the space was open enough that it didn't feel crowded, just convivial.

Eventually there was an enormous BOOM! from the gray battlecruiser marking one end of the starting line, and the boats, well, didn't seem to spring forward. There wasn't much wind, you see.

The start of the Swiftsure regatta.

We cycled inland, past an old cemetary and a neighborhood that reminded me of Sevenoaks, with big old houses behind hedges and grassy verges on the road. And some hills. We avoided the indignity of pushing our bikes up the last hill, but it was close. We steered for the Oak Bay neighborhood, and did more shopping, including a picnic lunch. Then, since Aaron's bag was full, we rode back to the hotel, unloaded, returned the bikes, and walked across to the bus depot for the 21 km trip to the Butchard Gardens.

Biking around, and now on the bus, it struck me how ordinary a lot of Victoria and its suburbs are, from my point of view. A lot of the time you could be walking/driving around Berkeley/Oakland. And then you have the ordinary-English influence----we drove past some row-houses with long strips of garden that could have been transplanted from London----but none of the English stuff is more than 180 years old and I think that's part of the disconcerting effect. And every once in a while you see a granite outcropping or a totem pole that doesn't fit either Oakland or England.

The bus took us beyond the suburbs and into the countryside, with more trees and wilder terrain. It's lovely. The Butchart Gardens seems well used to its standing as a world class tourist attraction. Everything is very clean and set up to facilitate the most efficient enjoyment experience for the people who throng there. It was very hot, but cooler in the shade, and the gardens had a great mix of shade and sunlight, and the paths curve and wind so that you have an illusion of privacy even as you follow the "recommended" one-way path through the gardens.

Shoping for lunch stuff.

The sunken garden was jaw-dropping. Especially because the lead-in to it is brilliantly designed, so that you emerge around a corner from a redwood grove, and suddenly you're standing at a balcony overlooking the length of this old quarry, filled with flowerbeds and trees and waterfalls. At the far end is a dropoff with a big pond at the foot, and in the pond is a fountain that dances in different patterns. Conveniently at the lookout is an ice-cream booth. That was refreshing. Formal lawns, a rose garden with just a few early-bloomers emerging, an Asian-inspired garden where we lingered because it was so shady and cooling with streamlets rushing through the ferns, a path down to an inlet where the family used to picnic & swim, and back again through a tall hedge into an Italian garden, and through a tunnel under the house into a large courtyard where we had started. We checked the bus schedule and found it would be almost an hour before the next departure, so we headed back to the sunken garden.

Stepping into the shower after returning from the gardens is one of the great moments of this vacation. I'm willing to admit that cool running water is almost as great an invention as hot running water.

For dinner we went to Canoe, for pub grub. It's a converted warehouse by the waterfront, with terraces overlooking the water. Turns out that pub grub can be Morroccan prawns and Thai beef salad with soba noodles. Unexpected, but very very good.