Victoria! Canada’s great Mazatlan peninsula, home of the touristiest tourist traps in the country. At any rate, that was the mindset I got off the plane with, so the trip went just fine.

Practically the first thing I did was to drag my mother into the Victoria Bug Zoo, using the fairly simple logic that if she didn’t come with me she’d have to be (gasp!) alone for all of half an hour. Turned out I was glad that she’d come, because guess what? You can hold the bugs!! I had thought it was cool enough just going around photographing them in their little exhibits, but then the guide came by and said, “God, it’s so dead today. You want to hold any of the bugs?” (I responded to this with a girlish squeal that could probably be heard on the moon.)

Mom gamely photographed me holding some of the bugs, though a lot of the photos were blurred because she does kind of a weird thing when she presses down the shutter button and the camera usually follows a ‘U’ path before she gets the button all the way down.

Giant Stabbing Spike Insect From Australia: Hello I am bug.
Me: Hello!
Face-Munching Japanese Ninja Insect: Hello I am bug.
Me: Hello!
Thirteen-Inch Millipede: Hello I am bug.
Me: Hello!
Ridiculously Large Fuzzy Spider: Hello I am bug.
Me: Hello!
Enormous Prickly Thing With Face Like Alien from Men In Black: Hello I am bug.
Me: Hello!

(Two seconds after this photo was taken, the bug quite cheerfully took a junket up to my head and hung out there until the guide came back to pry him off. Mom was too busy going “Wow, look at that!” to either take a photo or get him off herself.)

Then, Mom much more willingly went to the Empress Hotel for afternoon tea. Apparently, the governor general was there having tea at the same time, but she had a private room (with a private band!) and we didn’t see her. I was too busy stuffing myself with tiny sandwiches and gourmet tea anyway.

The Royal BC Museum was pretty good, though I’m disappointed I didn’t get to see an IMAX film while I was there. (I think it was “Horrible Things From the Deep” or something like that.) Though, I did get to see my best friend’s mom in the gift shop. She caught me up on five years of gossip in something like ninety seconds, so I left her chatting with my mom while I canvassed the gift shop for souvenirs.

Humboldt Squid!!

We also went to the Butchart Gardens, though I couldn’t persuade Mom to go to the Butterfly Gardens nearby. No description of their shimmering loveliness and rare beauty could sway her steadfast determination to skip that particular tourist trap. “Oh, you’re from the tropics,” I said, fed up, “you probably saw all these butterflies every day.” “No,” she says, “I just don’t want to spend the twelve bucks.”

The Butchart Gardens were my favourite part of the trip and were almost as pretty as I remember them being as a kid, which is very impressive. (We were too early in the year for roses, though.) I took about a hundred photos between snatches of familiar dialogue:

Bee: Hello I am -
Me: AAAAAAAAAAA!!

(Naturally, the microsecond we left the gardens the sun came out. Grrr.)

We also did a harbour cruise on one of those little put-put ferries that goes about ten kph (Mom refused to even consider a whalewatching excursion). It wasn’t a bad way to spend an hour but I think we would have been better served by the butterfly gardens or the art gallery. Thank God I talked her out of the wax museum and Miniature World, anyway.

That thing is the Johnson Street Bridge, the raising and lowering of which is powered by a mere two 70-hp motors!

And that thing is the Gorge, where a lot of ocean has to fit through a very small space and the tidal action and the algae produces so much foam that sometimes the entire area is covered a couple of feet deep, apparently.

So yeah, fun trip; we did some shopping and went through Trounce Alley and Fan Tan Alley and bought tea at Silk Road and hung around in Market Square and Munro Books and ate approximately a metric ton of gelato. (Oh, and Mark, we also ate at Cafe Vieux Montreal twice. The herbed turkey sandwich is awesome. Why didn’t anyone tell me pea shoots were so delicious? I would now eat them on anything, up to and including lemon meringue pie.)

Anyway, the old lady is going in for major surgery on June 2nd, so if this happens to be my last trip with her I guess it’s a pretty good one; and I already know where I’m going to scatter her! We passed a sacred burial ground on the harbour cruise.

Me: If you die on the operating table, I’ll wrap your body in birchbark and put it out on that island.
Mom: What, and have those seagulls eating me? Absolutely not!
Me: What if I cremated you and scattered the ashes?
Mom: Well, that’s fine then. But isn’t it a sacred site?
Me: Yeah. Sacred for Indians.
Mom: But we’re not -
Me: Yes we are. Indians are Indians, don’t you worry.
Mom: Well if it doesn’t work out I’ll just come back and haunt you anyway.