The pension excursion
From Embarking on the Journey of my Life in Victoria, Canada on Oct 26 '06
So me and Jenny(The girl renting one of the rooms at my cousin's house) got up at 7:10am to catch the tour bus which was going to pick us up at twenty past. I quickly got up did my morning business, brushed my teeth, got changed, went to drink a glass of milk scoffed some bread like the ones you get from breadtop and I was off.
Once we got to the tour pickup stop, we saw another couple waiting, who were also joining the tour. I didn't think anything of it at the start until a 15 seater white camper van look alike bus rolled up, yep it was the tour bus.
We jumped in and immediately jumped to the back seat and then and as I focussed my attention to the people around me I saw about 4 other couples all aged 50 plus. So I guess it wasn't the Contiki tour bus that I somewhat naively thought it would be. It felt like a group of pensioners going on an excursion for being on good behaviour the whole week. Sorry for being so mean but this is not what I expected. I wanted out but the tour was paid for and I was surely not going to get my money back.
So the pensioner excursion went on.
Our whole day was based on a city called Victoria, it was on Vancouver Island(Sort of like Tasmania and Australia). Autumn is so good damn beautful here, red and orange blended maple trees are everywhere dropping mountains of leaves on the streets, I
feel so sorry for people getting their rakes out on a Sunday morning, it must take at least a good couple of hours to clean it up. Then they've got the snow to plough aside in winter.
First stop was the ferry terminal, once we got to the ferry port we drove the car onto the ferry and parked the car into the car loading bay and went up to the ferry seating area. It took 1.5 hours to make it to Vancouver Island. Once we docked we went back to our tour bus and got ready to drive off, where we then headed to our first tourist attraction "The Butchant Gardens". There's not much to tell you about this garden other than it was quite beautiful and we did take a few postcard pics. We only were given 40 minutes here then we had to boot off to our next tour destination which was the Wax Museum, for those of you who don't know what the Wax Museum is, it is a museum of the rich and famous made out of wax to the exact life like person. It didn't seem too interesting but it was something that I can mark off my list, I guess it was different anyways and I did get a few snaps with Marilyn Monroe. And yep to those who have read the Divinci Code, and know the painting of the last supper there, they even made the waxed beings of the whole thing.
Onto our third destination, and that was the parliment house as we were walking there, I saw a bunch of young Canadian sailors posing on the steps of the parliment house so I quickly ran for the opportunity and took a picture with some sailor dudes which was pretty awesome. To bad there were some other Asian's in the picture I might have to photoshop them out or something.
Now our last tourist stop at Vancouver Island was the start of the longest paved highway in the world, the Trans Canada Highway Starting Point. Mile 0 measuring at 7821kms in length which goes from the West to the East right through Canada. I think by this time our tour guide was glad that he was nearly finishing up. He finally ended the tour by taking us to a so called "Wholesale store" where you could apparently buy cheap Canada T-shirts and hats and also asian dried food but we kind of figured out that he was taking all his clients there to earn commission for every sale he got, dodgy dodgy. At the end of the tour the tour guide did his his thankyou speel and added "and it is time receive my tip, most people normally tip $6 but if you liked the tour feel free to tip more." I was like WHAT THE? Where did that come from? Then I remembered Canadians have to tip, I thought it was just at restaurants but apparently it's for services too. Ended up giving the prick $10 and said to
myself I'm not going on a tour again. I can already see I'm not going to like this tipping business unless I'm on the other end getting the tips hahaha.
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