victoria

this past weekend, tim and i took off for a whole 2 nights! friday morning until sunday afternoon. we left our wee ones with my parents (who were willing to stay in abby all weekend at our house - so convenient! thank you, mom and dad!) and we went to victoria. we bought a groupon back in october for a two night stay at Parkside and it was SO lovely. just like the photos on the website.

after walking on the ferry and then taking a city bus to downtown, we filled our friday, saturday, and sunday with lots of dallas and rachel (our friends who moved there last year from edmonto) and lots of reading (the hunger games are an all consuming series). we had a couples' massage at the hotel spa on the first night there and rachel cooked us up some dinner in our hotel suite which was a great way to kick off the weekend.

saturday morning, we walked to breakfast here and i went against my usual predictability and ordered the Maple Bacon Sticky Bun...those are chunks of bacon on it. i wondered, "how could bacon taste good on this?" but it was awesome. we enjoyed the luxury of reading our books over breakfast both saturday and sunday.
we ate at lots of fun places - here, we faced the wind to enjoy the sunshine and ate on a dock at Red Fish, Blue Fish. and though tim had planned not to eat here because he does not like seafood (what a pain to find places to eat with this guy!), he found himself enjoying a BLT with tuna instead of bacon. rachel was so thrilled that tim ate something here that she continued to talk about it for the next two days. haha. rachel is the greatest hostess and made it her mission to feed us well and she and dallas showed us the best sights of victoria while we were there.

we got our history fix at Craigdarroch Castle which is on a regular looking cul-de-sac but at one time was the highest building in victoria. it has 39 rooms and was pretty cool to walk through.

the view from the top of the tower (above) and the view inside the tower (below)

we took a scenic drive and ended up at the top of mt. doug, catching the best light as the sun went down. we were pretty happy to have no rain all day despite the cold temperature that made me super happy to have my scarf and toque.

(walking down the mountain)

it was so amazing to have a few days away from the everyday though i wondered a LOT about what the kids were doing and if they were napping/eating/sleeping/crying etc. my mom managed to text me very, very few details though i continued to ask. haha. it was nice to have the chance to MISS the kids and of course, they had a great time while we were away.