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Back on the mainland and a bit of a travel cock up

We have now sailed back to the mainland and are staying in Vancouver. The reason for visiting Vancouver Island was to meet up with my uncle Fred who I have not seen since I was about 14, he was my mothers very much younger brother who, after doing national service which was spent in Germany as he spoke fluent German, he emigrated to Canada and became a professor teaching Russian and Chinese in Toronto University. I knew very little about my mothers background so it was great to get a crash course in family history.

The picture shows Fred in the wheelchair with Andrea (Fred's daughter so my cousin) and her daughter Charlotte. No idea who the handsome chap with the big beard is.

Yesterday they took us to the Butchart Gardens, the must see tourist attraction in Victoria and very good they are too. Beautifully tended gardens and very colourful, the sun shone so it was a a grand day out.

This morning they kindly dropped us off at the ferry terminal and we caught the ferry back to the mainland. Wealthy people fly in seaplanes to the centre of Vancouver in about 40 minutes, our journey took more than four hours and was a bit of a disaster.
Firstly we could not understand why people were queuing to get off the boat 15 minutes before arrival, now we know. Two buses meet the ferry and once they are full it is another hour before the next bus. They were full by the time we got off, we did not fancy an hours wait so caught a taxi at great expense to the nearest metro station.

The second problem is we naively assumed that Granville metro station is on Granville Island where we were staying and were rather pleased with ourselves when we negotiated the metro system to get there. We then discovered it is Granville STREET station and we had a horrid one mile walk to the hotel. We were not happy bunnies by the time we arrived over four hours after catching the ferry.

So what did we think of Vancouver Island? The island is beautiful particularly the coastline with lots of sheltered bays. Everyone was very helpful and kind to us stupid English people which ensured we had a good time.

Surprisingly to me although Vancouver Island has much the same climate as the UK they have hummingbirds, many out of focus pictures were taken of those in Fred's garden, one of the better ones is shown.

It was good fun camping, Canada is geared up for campers, the Parks Department have well organised camp sites in all the places you might want to stay, they have a tap, a long drop loo and nothing else, which suits us fine. By staying in a hotel every now and then we could have a shower and clean up so we did not get too smelly.

One surprise was that in the 12 days we only saw one sailing boat out in the water (the harbours have plenty tied up), it would seem to be a perfect sailing area but almost all the boats were powered.

Fred is the proud owner of a parrot who seems to prefer Charlottes head as she has rather more hair.

We are now staying one night in Vancouver before catching the Canadian Train for the four day trip to Toronto. Stand by for lots of boring pictures of trains.

Correction - Last week I showed a picture of a 14 year old boy and his mum and said she had caught the 27lb salmon. I was wrong, the lad caught it and even better it was the largest fish caught over the Labour Day weekend festival so he won $10,000 (about £6,700). Apparently he is going to buy a new bike!