Victoria, Vancouver and back home
Our Alaska cruise vacation is over – we got home a few hours ago, just after midnight. Spending 11 days on the Celebrity Infinity now ranks as our best cruise yet – a great itinerary and excellent service, with incredible weather. The surprise bonus was the people that we met on board – we met more people that we really enjoyed being with than on all of our previous cruises combined.
As we neared Victoria, our cabin’s salt-covered window was again washed – this is a good example of the extremely high level of service we experienced on the Infinity.
Two Royal Caribbean ships, the Radiance of the Seas and the Rhapsody of the Seas, were already docked when we arrived.
The cruise was apparently not going well for this fellow from the Rhapsody 🙁
Victoria tour operators do a very poor job of promoting themselves in an organized way. After seeing places like Juneau, it’s quite a shock to not be able to browse the options for getting downtown – so we just took the $7 shuttle bus instead of something like a pedicab (one of who we talked to but he wanted to do a full tour or nothing).
By the number of tour operators looking for clients, you’d never know that there were 6,000 extra people downtown.
This was an excellent, relaxing day for us. We explored downtown a bit…
… took a walk through Beacon Hill Park, and then a friend from high school drove down from a couple of hours north to meet us. We toured some of Victoria’s ritzy oceanfront residential areas and ended up at a pub in Saanich for a late lunch.
The show in the theatre tonight was wonderful, with an excellent pair of aerialists and a performance by singer Joni Butler. Take a few minutes and listen to her on her MySpace page – I think you’ll be as impressed by her as we are.
I missed sailing under the Lion’s Gate Bridge – it seems that my post-trip “crash” has begun. This photo of downtown Vancouver was shot from our cabin at 06:26, as soon as I woke up.
To fly on points we had to take a 9:45 pm flight back to Whitehorse, so had a lot of time to kill. While we had originally intended to rent a car at Canada Place and drop it at the airport, actually booking the rental had somewhow never happened. To allow wandering on foot easily, we had our luggage sent to YVR with this company, CDS Baggage – $35 for up to 4 pieces (which is what we had, including my SLR and laptop).
We spent a few hours in historic Gastown, exploring galleries and gift shops, and having lunch at The Olde Spaghetti Factory. We added a beautiful soapstone Dancing Bear sculpture by Cape Dorset Inuit artist Tony Ohotaq to our collection – we’ve been looking for one for a long time but hadn’t yet found one that spoke to us.
This is now the best way to get to YVR from downtown (or vice versa, of course). The Canada Line of the SkyTrain costs $3.75 and is very quick. Cathy thinks that it would be okay with cruise-size luggage, but I’m not completely convinced of that – it certainly works well with smaller luggage, as the cars are spacious.
Looking back at the Canada Line YVR station. Most of the line is underground – not until starting down the final slope to the Fraser River does it go elevated.
On board our CRJ waiting for push-back, at 9:24 pm.
Cathy and I both went to sleep almost immediately, and woke up as we were descending into Whitehorse. This was shot at 11:47 pm – back in the Land of the Midnight Sun! 🙂
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