The Royal British Columbia Museum, and a bit of Victoria
There’s never enough time. As slowly as we travel, we always wish there was more time. Day 10, May 5th, was the only day we had allotted to go into Victoria, and we chose to go to the Royal British Columbia Museum as the heart of the short day.
We laze around in the mornings, and didn’t even get to Island View Beach for the morning run until 10:00.
I thought that was a bloody big snake sunning himself beside the trail, and it was nice to hear a local confirm that I wasn’t just out of practice with snakes 🙂 Neither of the dogs even noticed it, perhaps because they just don’t know snakes.
This is such a wonderful place to begin and end our days.
Several painters were enjoying the scenery in their own ways.
We had arranged to meet a couple I know from Facebook for lunch in downtown Victoria, but I had grossly under-estimated how difficult it was to find parking. We were over half an hour late, but Cath and Bob had waited, and we had a very enjoyable lunch at Murchie’s. It’s really nice when you can connect with Facebook friends like that. Sometimes it doesn’t work, but in this case, lunch confirmed that we actually do have a lot in common.
We moved to a new parking spot behind the Parliament Buildings, and at 1:30 started our 3-block walk to the museum. I’d love to spend a while just exploring these wonderful buildings.
There are several memorials behind the Parliament Buildings. This one, the British Columbia Search and Rescue Volunteer Memorial, was just unveiled on March 2nd.
“The Last Alarm”, by artist Dean Lauzé, was installed in February 2013 to honour firefighters who have died in the line of duty.
The impressive approach to the Royal British Columbia Museum. We decided to see a 3D IMAX film as well – admission for both the museum and film was $31.95 for the kid, $25.75 for the old guy 🙂
The view over Victoria’s Inner Harbour from the gallery floor of the museum is lovely.
And you also get a good view of the front of the Parliament Buildings.
We started our tour of the museum in the Native history section. Not surprisingly, West Coast art takes up a substantial part of collection. Although there is some commentary about the much more difficult lives of Interior peoples, the displays give a distorted view of the pre- and early contact-period history of the province.
Some of the small argyllite totem poles in the very large display were incredibly detailed.
We used the IMAX film to separate our tours through the Native and Modern history sections. 3D is pretty cool, but “Dream Big” was otherwise not worth paying to see.
I was surprised to find a Yukon piece with no BC connection – there’s no interpretive note with it. This undated ticket got John Alice down the Yukon River from Ralston’s Woodcamp to Selkirk on a British Yukon Navigation Company sternwheeler.
The amount of information presented at the museum is overwhelming. I wish I could go through it over a week or two, a couple of hours at a time. There are some wonderful models, like this logging railway show.
And some artifacts like this tiny bellows camera, a “Vest Pocket Kodak Special” are really unusual.
I do have 2 complaints about the museum. First, the navigation is very confusing. And some areas are far too dark, to the point where the interpretive signage can’t be read. Would I go back, though? Absolutely yes.
Walking back to the car along the side of the Parliament Buildings at 4:30, we came to this Heritage BC Stop of Interest sign which says: “‘The Birdcages.’ The Legislative Buildings for the Colony of Vancouver Island were built on these grounds in 1859. Nicknamed ‘The Birdcages’ because of their quaint style, they were replaced in 1894-97 by the present buildings. The original Legislative Hall, meeting place of the first House of Assembly west of the Great Lakes, was preserved until 1957 when it was destroyed by fire.”
A good dinner of fish and chips was our wish for the evening, and we ended up at Barb’s at Fisherman’s Wharf. The halibut was very good, as we’d heard it would be.
On a walk along the wharf after dinner, we saw someone feeding fish scraps to 3 harbour seals.
And then an otter joined the seals 🙂
To end the day, we returned to Island View Beach Park with Bella and Tucker. They’d been in the RV all day (7 hours), and were ready to run.
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