The day started with breakfast at Jam Cafe. A well-known breakfast spot that manages to get on pretty much every list of great restaurants in Victoria that I could find. As it doesn’t take reservations we simply lined up for breakfast around 11:30. Turns out the line up came with our first encounter with a rare specimen of the island’s fauna. As we waited in line two, clearly seasoned CrossFitters ran by the line. I initially just saw the back of their head but the shape of the body and colour of the hair was very similar to a well-known resident of Nanaimo. A minute or two later we saw them run back and, sure enough, Patrick Velner was running next to us. They repeated the run two more times and Karine’s inner fan girl bubbled with enthusiasm. We ended up seeing Michele Letendre (from Dekacomp) as we got seated as well. Talk about rare and exciting sightings.
After all the excitement from the local fauna, we made our way to the Butchart Garden to explore the local flora. We were taken aback at first by the price of entry (36$ per person) but, quickly understood why when we started our visit. Everything was in bloom and everything was manucures and carefully tended to. Clearly a lot of people spend a lot of time planting and moving flowers to keep those gardens so beautiful even in mid-September. There was an explosion of flowers. Karine was, of course, super happy and entranced by all the flowers. As you can guess, a large number of photos were taken during our roughly two-hour visit at the gardens.
The day ended with wine (as we must) on the apartment patio. The upside of appartement rental is they often have much bigger patios than hotel rooms.
Tomorrow we’re meeting big trees!