7/29/2017 - Driving Downtown Victoria

Saturday - We took it easy today, had a late start but finally headed out about noon.  Our first stop was at Canadian Tire, where Joe wanted to look at a plug-in cooler like Collins has.  We didn't buy it then, the one on sale was sold out, and decided to see if Walmart had it, so we continued on.  We headed down to the Visitors Center to get some more brochures and a map.  The GPS got us within a couple blocks, so we found a parking place and headed down toward the wharf.   Buildings around the parking lot had murals on the side -- the first one had people looking out the windows, we thought it was real at first.

We saw more murals later on so I hope I get a picture of them on our next trip downtown.  One was of bears!   At a sidestreet where we were waiting to cross, a lady driving a tourist horse and cart was also waiting and we asked her for more directions and met her horse. It seems to take us lots of direction to get around any more.

After our stop at the Visitors Center, we walked back along the wharf, watching the seaplanes and boats coming and going.  It was quite breezy and chilly, and again, my sweatshirt was in the car.

We had driven through this open-air shopping area just before we parked, so we walked through it on our way back to the car.  It was called Bastion Square, and had craft items, artwork, windchimes, jewelry, leather goods, etc. for sale.

There were a few restaurants along here and they were very crowded.  Lots of flowers all over the city.

 I really liked this piece of driftwood that had photos attached to it.

And the windchimes were also very appealing, especially for my "work-in-progress" beach room.

We left downtown and worked our way to Walmart, almost missing it completely.  Actually we had given up on it when I saw the sign on the side of a building.  It was part of a huge mall, 2-story with a parking garage under it.  It had those fancy escalators that have a separate "lane" for your shopping cart to go up and down.  We had seen this in California at Target several years ago with John and Bridgette.  We managed to catch up with the cart as it came down, so that was good.  My picture of the cart behind us didn't turn out very good (you can see the paper towels in the cart).

From there, we headed back to the campground so I could do laundry and Joe could go back to the Canadian Tire store and buy that cooler.  Then we just stayed in the rest of the day, gearing up for our next Adventure.  We plan to tour the famous Butchart Gardens tomorrow, another item on my bucket list!  And on Monday, do a hop-on, hop-off city tour of Victoria.