9/9/22
I took so many unbelievable photos at the Butchart Gardens today. I will need a separate post (maybe two!) for them.
But I didn’t want to skip over sharing the few other nice photos I had of the city of Vancouver, as well as my multimodal journey today. (I traveled by bicycle, coach bus, and ferry.)
The ride to the bus at the train station in downtown Vancouver was lovely in the morning light.
I stopped for a quick breakfast, then made my way along the waterfront bike path to the BC Connector coach that picks you up in Vancouver, drives you onto the ferry, and deposits you on the other side. Most of the passengers were taking the bus all the way to downtown Victoria. Since I wanted to visit the Butchart Gardens, though, I disembarked on the ferry, just in time to ride off at the terminal in Swartz Bay.
The sailing was smooth, and the weather was perfect to stand out on the deck. It was cool to pass through the Gulf Islands on the way. My family had taken this ferry a few times in my youth, when we visited my great-aunt who lived in Sidney, north of Victoria. (My grandparents lived up the island in Comox, so we would make a whole trip of it from Virginia every few years.)
After taking my disassembled rig out of the bus’s cargo bay, I put it together and rolled it over to the edge of the bus-and-truck deck to where other passengers’ bikes were. There were quite a few (maybe 10 of us in all?) including a couple with a trailer containing their dog—so cute!
Much of the roughly hour-long ride to my Warmshowers hosts’ house near the gardens was on dedicated bikeways, so it was a pretty pleasant ride.
When I arrived at their house, it was about 5:00 and I knew the light was fading fast, so I dropped off the trailer in their garage and then took off for the 20-minute ride to the gardens.
The light was beautiful when I got there. In a subsequent post (or two) I will share photos from the breathtaking sunken and Japanese gardens, but there were some other lovely garden views that I’ll amalgamate here tonight.
When I left and returned to the house, I caught a lovely glimpse of sunset.
What a beautiful place Vancouver Island is.
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