Gift Trip to Victoria

Grant Flindt won a travel package to Victoria B.C. as the award for winning a race.  Since 15-year-old Grant was not in a position to treat a significant other to a weekend in Victoria, Kyle and Lisa bought the package from Grant and gave it to us.  Dave and I had a great time, on Memorial Day weekend, first spending a day in Victoria and then visiting Kyle and Lisa in Seattle.

We drove from Seattle across the Kitsap Peninsula to Port Angeles to take the ferry.  We had a couple of hours in Port Angeles to admire the port and follow the logging trucks from the Olympic Peninsula to a lumber mill and a paper factory.

We also wandered through the many Port Angeles antique shops.  David found a bronze replica of Bernini's statue of David.  I dressed in a mink stole and posed on a vintage, brocade sofa.

We love ferry rides anywhere.  As we left shore, we looked back at the picturesque Port Angeles harbor and out to Canada beyond.

In Victoria, we ate dinner at Skinnytato, an excellent Polish restuarnt recommended by Yelp!  It was founded by Polish refugees who migrated to Canada in 1985, before the Iron Curtain collapsed.  The owner told us about her long-time hope to start a restaurant, which is now being fulfilled.  A camera crew from Food Network filmed a segment on Skinnytato last weekend.   Dave and I ate piroshkis stuffed with sauerkraut and bacon, potato pancakes served with goulash and a selection of root vegetable salads, and apple cake with plum sauce.  I will continue with my search for a great Polish restaurant in Chicago, another area with lots of Polish immigrants.

Grant's gift package included a night in the penthouse suite of Chateau Vistoria, just a handful of streets from Victoria's colorful pier.  We had our own living room with fireplace, dining room, kitchen, master bedroom and two baths, and a deck looking out to sea in three directions.  It was the most luxurious hotel room in which we'd ever stayed!

Next stop was Buchart Gardens, which we visited with Lisa, Camille, and Michael many years ago and then with Lisa's family in 2008.  It is as beautiful as ever, with spring bulbs still in bloom and summer flowers blossoming.

We took a boat trip into the bay surrounding Buchart Gardens.  It was a treat to see elegant yachts, a plane that landed on the water, and even a funky houseboat with a hammock hanging out over the bay.

Next stop was Craigdarroch Castle, a 19th century mansion owned by a family that made its fortune in coal.  I love Victorian and turn-of the-20th century furnishings, and the examples in the castle were distinctive.  It was also fascinating to learn the family's soap opera history, ranging from a drowning on the Lusitania to marrying into English nobility.

We walked the Victoria waterfront and then watched an IMAX movie in the BC Museum on building railroad tracks through the Canadian Rockies.  There was a special dinosaur exhibit that was particularly interesting because Alberta, Canada, has made some of the greatest dinosaur discoveries in the world.

We finished the day with seafood chowder and sweet potato fries on the wharf.  As we walked past the elegant Empress Hotel to the ferry, we passed a reception for a Canadian pop singer guarded by (who would have suspected?) female Mounties.

Farewell, Victoria.

Is it a Bird? Is it a Plane? Detroit III

"Is this a living history museum?" Dave, Jonny, and I asked ourselves as we wandered around Greenfield Village.  The Village contains recreations of buildings from different ages of American history, from a colonial cottage built in Sudbury MA in the 1600s, to a slave cabin from Maryland in the 1850s.  There are even a few European sites thrown in, such as a cottage built in the 1400s from the English Cotswolds.  There were also demonstrations of crafts, such as turn-of-the-20th-century pottery kilns, looms, and mills, and there were various forms of transportation, such as old-time steam railroads, Model T Fords, and horse-drawn trolleys.  There were costumed interpreters, but there was no common time period, as in most living history museums. It was a marvelous hodge-podge of whatever caught Henry Ford's fancy.  And of course there was a carousel, where we could feel the sheer joy of going round and round and up and down.

We expected to stay in Greenfield Village for just a few hours on Monday morning, May 21, but it was so full of walk-in wonders that we lingered on and on. We thought of Lisa's and Camille's families, and how much the kids would love wandering through the buildings and riding the railroad.

The first section of the Village included important buildings from Henry Ford's life.  We explored his boyhood farm home, moved to the Village from just four miles away, and the early Ford Motor Company building, filled with auto equipment and early Model Ts. 

We paused for a ride around the Village in a Model T.  Ours was one of four recreations, built for $250,000 apiece, to celebrate an important anniversary of Ford Motors.

Henry Ford's hero was Thomas Edison, who obtained literally thousands of patents for such things as the electric light bulb and the record player.  Edison and Ford vacationed together in Florida during the winters and became good friends.  Edison's statue now graces Greenfield Village and his New Jersey laboratory has been moved to the Village.  We watched docents show us how an early phonograph worked. 

The Wright Brothers' bicycle shop, where they invented the airplane, was another Village treasure.

We checked out the tintype shop, where we rested on the sofa used for families getting their photos taken during the 1800s.

We wandered past the Tennessee home of African Americans in the 1930s, insulated with newspaper and displaying a game of checkers played with a painted board and bottle caps.  And we paused to hear a skit by a household slave in 1840s Virginia, telling about preparing a party for her master and mistress, and about the furtive gatherings of slaves "by the river bank" in the evenings.  She led the children in the audience in a mock run away to freedom.

We felt right at home in the Sudbury colonial cottage from the 1600s, originally owned by the Plympton family.  We know all about Sudbury.  We were not so familiar with a windmill from 1700s Cape Cod.  Today's controversial wind farms off the Cape have a precedent.

We loved the Cotswolds, in southern England, and Henry Ford did, too.  The house Ford moved from Britain looked like the one Mr. Toad rode on his wild ride. 

Another interesting stop was the home of Noah Webster, creator of the dictionary.  He was a Yale professor who took a life-long delight in words.

We relaxed during a ride on a horse drawn bus, like ones moving about American towns and cities during the late 1800s. 

We imagined 19th century America at its most idyllic, as we visited a mill and its mill pond, full of ducks.

We reluctantly left Greenfield Village for our drive back to Chicago.  One last delight awaited us.  Jonny had told us, all weekend, about Kuma's burgers, the best in Chicago.  "But these are my people," he warned me.  "No cheesy photographs."  I humbly obeyed.  These photos of the "Mastodon," my choice of burger, are straight off Google.  I consider myself one of Jonny's "people", too, but I wasn't about to offend his other friends.