jlub

As usual, looking for suggestions. Arriving SeaTac 8/24 late evening - 3 of us including 21 yo daughter. Probably find something for the night not too far, not sure where, but heading north. Apparently the ferry from Anacortes through the San Juan's to Sidney (Victoria) is not in service for like 7 more years?

Day 1 Friday 8/25 Head up to Whidbey Island, check out our old home north of Coupeville, then take the ferry to Port Townsend. Spend the day on the Olympic Peninsula, any suggstions? Stay the night somewhere not too far from Port Angeles.

Day 2 Saturday 8/26 Take Black Ball ferry to Victoria perhaps mid afternoon. Stay at the Empress? Very pricey, worth it? Or other suggestions?

Day 3 Sunday 8/27 Reserve afternoon tea at the Empress, other sight seeing? Maybe Butchart Gardens, too far to go to one of the Provincial Parks? Take afternoon or early evening ferry to Vancouver. Again, recommendations for lodging?

Day 4 Monday 8/28 Drop daughter off at Vancouver airport for flight back to US. Parents drive back towards Seattle to stay with relatives.

Price ranges: Moderate to somewhat splurging (Empress would be a splurge)
Activities: Light exercise mostly (wife had knee surgery recently and still favoring atm)

Any and all suggestions much appreciated!

Gardyloo

That sounds doable but quite rushed. Quick question: How important is Victoria? You're looking at a lot of expense and time consumed for a relatively short amount of time on the ground on Vancouver Island.

Personal opinions, take them for what they're worth (probably not much) -

- Tea at the Empress is way overpriced and underwhelming. Nice room, for sure, but very touristy.
- Butchart Gardens, also overpriced. Splendid, but there are alternatives...

Now we don't know you or your daughter, so maybe this is way off target, but consider...

What if you stayed on the mainland after seeing the house on Whidbey, and instead of heading across to the Olympic peninsula, simply headed north and spent the night in White Rock BC? A few days ago, the Seattle Times ran an article about White Rock that confirms what my family has thought for years - it's a very enjoyable little seafront town with a lot going for it. White Rock, B.C., is the best beach town on the Salish Sea | The Seattle Times

The next day, head into Vancouver and have afternoon tea someplace there. Evidently the afternoon tea at the Fairmont is extraordinary, cheaper than the one at the Empress.

Before or after the tea, check out the gardens in Queen Elizabeth II Park, right in Vancouver. These are free (as opposed to $$$ for Butchart) and if you add in the Bloedel Conservatory (small entrance fee) with its tropical plants and LOTS of tropical birds, one might well argue the whole experience in on a par, or maybe better, than Butchart Gardens with its parked tour buses.


What else could you do? Well, how about a Southeast Asian night market, with umpteen food stalls, music, shops and things to see and eat? Easy parking or ride the Skytrain from downtown Vancouver (it's in Richmond, near the airport) -


Or what about some Shakespeare? The Bard on the Beach Shakespeare festival goes on all summer at its spectacularly sited venue facing the downtown skyline.



You could drive up the beautiful Sea to Sky Highway (BC 99) toward Whistler, and maybe stop for the gondola at Squamish - Sea to Sky Gondola | Squamish | Sea to Sky Gondola .

Or spend time at the Granville Island market, or the Punjabi Market on Main Street, get your toes wet at one of Vancouver's nice beaches, or get lost (easy to do) in incredible Stanley Park.

The point being, you'd have a lot more time to see and do things rather than getting between them. Just a thought, anyway.

jlub

Haven't gone through your entire response (but I will, in detail). But Gardyloo, you're opinions and inputs are EXACTLY what I was hoping for when I posted. Haven't booked anything yet, so wide open to your suggestions.

BC_Robyn

I like gardyloo’s suggestions a lot. I also agree that if you’re going through all the time and expense to get to Victoria, you’d ideally want more time there.

If you need to ultimately end in Vancouver, bypassing Victoria for the Vancouver area would probably give you a less frantic pace but still get you hitting all similar experiences. Victoria’s worth visiting, but I’d just save it for another time.

Another idea, similar in ways to White Rock, is a visit to Steveston, which is a charming historic fishing village at the mouth of the Fraser River. It’s a fun pleasant afternoon outing with scenic boardwalk walkways, the largest commercial fishing fleet in Canada (some selling fresh fish off their boats from the docks), waterfront restaurants, ice cream shops, fish & chips shacks, even one tiny English style afternoon tea place, Mr. Gold's, small family-run businesses and gift shops, unique heritage boatyard sites and old salmon canneries from the early 1900s that have been turned into national historic sites and interactive museums. It’s also a popular departure point for whale watch tours, but those eat up at least 5 hours of the day.


For gardens, Queen Elizabeth Park is a free city park to visit with Butchart-like flower gardens built out of a former rock quarry. It's quite lovely. A few blocks to the east of QE Park is Main Street, a hip area full of fun casual restaurants (some recently winning Michelin recognition), local cafes, a diversity of indie shops (unique-to-Vancouver clothing stores, home decor stores, book stores, record stores), craft breweries, and so on. It's a great leisurely window-shopping street and dinner or lunch destination, quite authentic to Vancouver. So that can easily be another area to focus on. Or actually, just have a beautiful lunch at Seasons in the Park restaurant in QE Park, which overlooks the park and Vancouver's distant skyline. I think it would fit your budget and it's always a special occasion to go there, even if it's just a spontaneous glass of wine on their outdoor deck: https://www.vancouverdine.com/seasons/. Remember, all prices on their menu would be in Canadian dollars.

However as an alternative to Butchart, I usually recommend VanDusen Botanical Garden if you’re after a botanical garden experience in Vancouver. It’s larger than Queen Elizabeth Park and while it’s not free, it’s a fraction of the cost of Butchart. Like Butchart, it can easily occupy two hours. Butchart is famous because it has a big marketing budget, and it is more of a show garden (i.e. it’s all about the aesthetic - bedding plants carefully planted in patterns) whereas VanDusen definitely has aesthetic beauty but it’s also a place to learn about botany - learning the names of the plants, enjoying themed gardens that show off more than just flowers in bloom (i.e. the fern dell, the rhododendron and azalea groves, the bamboo walk, the coastal Indigenous forest, the Lebanese cedar grove, the medicine garden, the hedge maze, the various meadows and ponds and public artwork, etc.) They have flowers in bloom too of course but it’s just one part of the overall experience.

I blog for fun very sporadically but I wrote a blog last year about Vancouver’s different gardens, where I’ve included pictures, which might help get a sense of the options and how they differ:

https://www.bcrobyn.com/2022/05/vanc...chart-gardens/

Finally, if you’re just after some nature and outdoor time, I’d probably prioritize Stanley Park, which is the jewel of Vancouver. It’s 1000 acres of wild rainforest wilderness, sandy beaches, gardens, trails, and monuments, surrounded by miles of paved waterfront walkways known as the Seawall. You could spend all day in Stanley Park and not see it all. And various areas of the park can be accessed by car, so you don't have to commit to walking it all if somebody's recovering from knee surgery.

Gardyloo

Totally agree on Van Dusen Gardens and would also mention the Dr. Sun Yat Sen Chinese garden right in downtown Vancouver.

If you have some extra hours to spend around Seattle, and if you're into gardens, a simply superb outing can be had by riding the ferry from downtown Seattle to Bainbridge Island and visiting the Bloedel Reserve (same people.) This is a botanical garden mainly featuring native plants to the region. It has a superb Japanese garden, a wonderful "moss garden," and it's all in a grand setting a 10-minute drive (or accessible by public transport) from the Bainbridge ferry terminal. Bloedel Reserve | One of North America's 10 Best Botanical Gardens

Also agree on Steveston. A popular TV show, Once Upon a Time, was filmed there. (And it's worth noting that you'll keep running into movie shooting locales all around Vancouver and the lower mainland. The Bloedel Conservatory itself keeps cropping up in all sorts of TV shows and movies.)

jlub

OK, I think we're officially skipping Victoria and hopefully instead having afternoon tea at the Vancouver Fairmont. We used to ski Whistler, driving up the moonlit sea-sky highway starting from Whidbey Island at 4 AM and being first in the lift lines. May try to see it in the summer, but Steveston sounds like just the sort of town I'd like to see and perhaps stay a night. I only mentioned Butchart Garden for lack of other idea, but some of the other garden ideas sound good. But Stanley Park I think is definitely on the gonna do list. We never somehow made it there before and I really want to spend time there. Would like to fit in another ferry ride if there's time, other than Mukilteo Clinton to Whidbey. Visiting our old home just up from the beach on the windward side of Whidbey isn't necessary, just a side trip if we were going to take the ferry from Coupeville a couple miles away. The new owners sort of ruined the home anyway.

FYI, the trip is sort of a "reward" trip for my 21 yo going to be senior at the UC who's working both an internship and a research position this summer. Short but hopefully sweet. Also, should say, haven't booked anything yet except flights. Not sure how critical reservations are for afternoon tea at the Fairmont.

sunbum1944

There is a new ferry service starting this summer between Vancouver and Nanaimo. I can't find an exact date- says starting early August. Its a passenger ferry-

BC_Robyn

If you want a ferry, you could consider the 20-minute ferry over to Bowen Island from Horseshoe Bay in West Vancouver. But you'd want to leave your car by Horseshoe Bay - the bits you'd explore on Bowen (Crippen Regional Park, Snug Cove) are within walking distance of where the ferry docks.

emaolivia1667

Starting in early August, a new passenger ferry service is set to launch between Vancouver and Nanaimo. While the exact date isn't available at the moment, this service offers an exciting transportation option for the summer.