One Year Away

Joseph

We’re a couple of days behind on our postings now.  We’ve been on trains getting from Vancouver to Sacramento where we are now.  I’ll put a short post here about the rest of our time in Vancouver and our visit to Victoria.

In the evening after visiting Stanley Park (see post below), we had dinner with two friends who have recently moved out to Vancouver, Hilary and Adrian "Ace" Pelosi.  Continuing our theme of eating excellent Asian food we went to a Japanese tapas (or Izakaya) restaurant.  Hilary knew exactly what to order and we had plate after plate of delicious Japanese food creations.

It was great to catch up with them and talk about all the changes that we’ve each been going through.  Adrian and Hilary transplanted themselves from Toronto to Vancouver and are getting new jobs, new friends, etc.  Penny and I have picked up and left for a year of travel and recently became engaged.  We’ve each made significant life decisions recently and it was fun to be able to talk about them with someone in a similar situation. 

The next day we got up early (it seems there’s going to be a lot of that this year) and caught the ferry to Victoria.  It took us about 4 hours total travel time each way from our hostel to downtown Victoria.  We could have cut that down if we had taken taxis and express buses but we’re trying to stay within a certain budget so we decided to go the most economical (slow) way.  We still managed to spend most of the the day walking around the nice downtown area and waterfront. 

Personally, I thought that Victoria would be a city that my mother would love.  It has nice shops, an old English atmosphere to it, wonderful views of the water and most importantly a large quilt shop.  For Penny and I though there really wasn’t that much to keep us occupied. 

So in order to kill some time we entered Victoria’s Bug Zoo, which claims to have Canada’s largest ant farm.  Being something of an amateur myrmecologist (one who studies ants) I was the one pushing for it.  Penny, who is so afraid of insects she made me promise to kill any bugs we encounter during this trip, was not so keen.  We got in and the staff entomologist was giving a tour to a group of children which we joined. 

Then, the moment I’d secretly been waiting for happened.  The entomologist opened a case and pulled out a 6 inch long giant millipede which he put into the hands of one of the awestruck children.  As the kids stood with eyes wide the entomologist asked if one of the adults wanted to hold the millipede.  With a bit of prodding Penny stepped forward.  I love this picture.