Bill&Theresa: Day 10

Well, she says she's "French Canadian"... :-)

Craigderroch Castle

Ah, the last day. A bittersweet mix of sad it’s over and kind of looking forward to going back to normal. We visited Victoria, British Columbia back in October/November of 2011, so we were kind of leisurely about our tour choices. (I had to go back looking through the blog to remember the dates!) For the morning, there was a “city tour” and a visit to Craigdarroch Castle. Back in 2011, we saw a performance of “Fall of the House of Usher” set in the castle. But we didn’t really get a tour of the place or any sense of its history. So, we thought it might be nice to revisit.

The bus drove around the city, and the driver talked about the sights and highlights. It was pretty nice, and had some interesting moments. Some of the history was salacious. We passed a few places we recognized from 8 years ago, including a few from a Ghost Tour we did back then.

The castle was built by a coal baron, but he died just before it was finished, so he never got to actually live in his amazing dream castle. His family did not get much use out of it, because about a decade after its completion the matron died too, and the property ended up being sold as a raffle. So, a $500,000 home was won by a $1 raffle ticket. The person who won the raffle took out a bunch of speculative loans, defaulted, and it was taken by the bank. It became a military hospital, then a college, and eventually it was made into a museum.

I think I have one like this in 2011.

I love the wood work here. There are over 2000 white oak panels.

This is the "servant's stairs".

What a behemoth!! It has about 5000 passengers, compared to our 750!

Fancy room, huh?

After the Craigdarroch tour, we grabbed a quick lunch, and headed out to High Tea at the Empress Hotel. The details said to dress “smartly”, so we changed quickly and headed out. The High Tea tour included another “tour” of Victoria. Luckily, it was a bit different from our first Victoria tour of the day. We got to tea time and were seated in high back chairs right in front of the piano. It was nice, but the room was huge, noisy, and the number of people that didn’t read (or ignored) the “smart” dress took away from the ambiance, as it’s hard to think it’s special when there are people in shorts with backpacks going around… But, we had fun sharing the tower…though there is no way people eat like this between lunch and dinner! It was a third meal!

Ah, a tower of food! THAT's what we need!

Victoria Inner Harbor has the most float plane traffic in the world!

Back “home” for our last trivia (we came in third) and turning in our points for Regent “bling” (t-shirts and a purse hanger). As we started pushing away from the pier, someone was feeding the seagulls (pretty sure that’s frowned on). So, they were hanging out near the boat, and dive-bombing for broken bread crumbs. We packed quickly, and headed to dinner.