Canada Day in Victoria, BC

I’m a little late but… Happy Canada Day, my fellow Canadians!

On the Canada Day long weekend, Dan and I caught the ferry to head over to the island again. As we’re moving to Australia, we have a mini bucket list of things to do and see in BC, and Victoria was on the list. We both been to Victoria but it’s been years since I visited and this was also our first time visiting together.

Dan’s from the island so we stayed in Nanaimo at his dad’s place before visiting Victoria. On Saturday, we had a late start to the day and hit the road around 11am. Victoria is about a 1.5 hr drive from Nanaimo. It was cloudy and eventually started to rain when we came into town – but luckily there no traffic!

Our first stop was the Royal BC Museum where we caught their featured Egypt: Time of the Pharaohs exhibit. It’s been years since I’ve read about Ancient Egypt and oh my god, do I miss it! Honestly, this exhibit was the sole reason why we even decided to stop by the museum, haha. We ended up skipping an entire floor when we came out of the exhibit and headed for lunch. Since then, I’ve been lowkey reading up on Ancient Egypt.

For lunch, we stopped by Sam’s Deli & Bistro, a decent little place just up the block from the museum. I originally wanted to grab McDonald’s to keep it cheap but I thought, what the hell? We’re in Victoria so let’s try something local and new! The deli place was one of the first restaurants we saw and the food menu looked good.

The food was yummy but definitely not worth $30 (and for lunch, nonetheless!). I don’t want to sound cheap buuuut… we are trying to save for an overseas move!

After the museum and lunch, we started to make our way down to Fan Tan Alley and Chinatown. When I first visited Victoria with a group of friends, we toured slightly around Chinatown but I’ve never visited Fan Tan Alley! It was super neat and they had awesome stores. We were only there because beside Fan Tan Alley was this French pastry shop I wanted to drop by to grab Dan’s dad his favourite lemon tart.

We took a nice stroll along the harbour, making our way closer to the car and a park. As you can probably tell, the sky cleared up!

Just before calling it day to head back to Nanaimo for dinner, we dropped by Beacon Hill Park which is this beautiful park just a 5-10 minutes walk from Downtown Victoria! It had a lake in the middle of it with ducks, and archways filled with flowers. It turned out, there was also a little petting farm in the park as well! We dropped by to visit some of the animals.

It was nothing but clear blue skies when we drove back to Nanaimo. There was a bit of construction going on but nonetheless, driving on the wide open Canadian roads with the mountains and ocean to the right of me made me reflect on how lucky I am to call Canada my home.

I also wanted chicken wings so Dan took me to a popular pub in Downtown Nanaimo. He recalled that the pub was a pretty “lit” place back in the days when he used to go out with his friends to get piss drunk. It did look like a fun place to be for Saturday night, haha. I ended up sending an image to Stephen and he recognized it instantly and told me that the popular nightclub they used to go to was just upstairs.

I take this entire post back… I didn’t spend actual Canada Day in Victoria – I just spent the long weekend, there LOL.