Blue skies: first day in Victoria

(Late Saturday night)

What a glorious day! Chilly but not a cloud overhead all day long. About 7:20 a.m. Penny the Prius and I were in line to board the ferryboat MV Coho from Port Angeles, WA, to Victoria, BC. An hour later we were under way, with my camera snapping away. This photo shows the city pier with the observation tower I climbed yesterday. More strikingly, it shows that the Olympic Peninsula has a snowcapped mountain of its own - or so I thought at the time. A couple of miles out, a whole range of snowy mountaintops had emerged from behind lower coastal mountains. I heard a passenger say that they are the Olympic Mountains, which I see on the map are in Olympic National Park, the entire center of the peninsula. (I apologize for the tilted shoreline - photographer error.)

As we approached Victoria my fellow passengers started pointing out the large number of Canadian and foreign naval vessels filling the roads outside Victoria Harbor for Fleet Day in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the Canadian Navy. This photo shows the U.S. aircraft carrier Ronald Reagan with its after flight deck lined by sailors standing in parade formation in their dress blues (at least I think these are approximately the right terms), with another vessel beyond it to the right.

Here's a view of the Victoria waterfront from the vehicle deck, just before they sent us to our cars to prepare to disembark. Less than 15 minutes after passing through Canadian customs I was at Dawn and Konia's beautiful home.

At 12:30 we walked up to a hilltop park near their house to try to catch a glimps of the performance by the Snowbirds, the Canadian Navy's precision flying team. Mostly we just saw tiny sparks of light in the distance as the nine (or maybe 12) jets caught the sunlight at the right angle, and the smoke trails they laid down as they passed low over the harbor a couple of miles away  behind low hills. I got only one photo of smoke, but far better photos of the snowy Olympic Mountains, clearly visible across the 20-mile strait in this photo. Meanwhile, to the east, Mt. Baker on the Washington mainland towered huge and ghostly above a horizon hidden by haze.

After a delightful lunch with them and their son Jordi, I borrowed Jordi's bike so Dawn, Konia and I could ride downtown along the waterfront for a few kilometers and tour the mixture of old English, modern, and just opulent houses on the way downtown and back. Victoria is a prosperous small city in a province that hasn't felt the most severe effects of the recession. They attribute this happy outcome to the fact that Canada and its provinces kept a tighter regulatory rein on their banks than the U.S. did in the last couple of decades.

Shortly after we returned home, staff members at Konia's clinic began to arrive for their annual backyard barbecue. I had met a few of them at past national meetings and had a great time with all of them, but was happy to be tapped as grill cook since it wasn't always easy to follow their conversations about British Columbia places and office incidents.