Vacation! I love vacation! I don’t count the time of my unemployment as such because I didn’t go anywhere and was sad all the time. I like the kind of vacation that involves going somewhere new and having fun and going out for a nice dinner, whereas being unemployed is more about sitting by the phone and weeping silently, tightening one’s belt.
So imagine my delight, when I went in to my first day of work on Friday, to discover that I don’t really start until next Monday, so I have another week free. My new boss was all, “Well, your mom’s in town, and I’m going to California anyway, so have a nice week and I’ll see you then.” Cool, right? Extra cool because I had already booked this little vacation with my mom before I got the job, and was going to take yesterday off anyway.
So Mom got in Friday night, late, and we did some stuff on Saturday that involved shopping and hanging out, and my going to a bellydance rehearsal (the performance is next Sunday!). Sunday we got up eeeeeeaaaarrrrrllllllyyyy and made our way down to the Victoria Clipper, which is this high-speed catamaran looking thing that whisks you away to Canada. I was glad I’d brought along my passport along with license, which is what most people use to get into Canada, as I wasn’t born in the States and that, for some reason, was supposedly going to make the Canadian border officials nervouse. Of course, I was born in Canada, so you’d think they’d be eager to welcome me back, and actually, now that I think about it, they were. We were able to check into our hotel early, and then we walked into Downtown Victoria along the Inner Harbour and got our bearings. Victoria is super touristy. In a nice way, I guess. Like, lots of hanging baskets full of flowers and horse-drawn carriage tours, and shops selling Irish linen, and a lot of signs telling Americans: “Hey, It’s Like Thirty Percent Off Because They Don’t Use Real Money Here, So Make Sure To Buy Stuff, Okay!” This turned out to be a tenet to which we clung dearly.
After finding and devouring lunch, we hopped on a bus to the Butchart Gardens. You guys know Mom just got back from France, right, where she went to the Giverny Gardens, home of Monet The Impressionist With The Water Lilies? She is now determined to make a World Garden Tour, and this one was the first stop on her North American leg. I guess I like flowers fine. I am not really interested in gardening, myself, but I like fresh flowers and I am glad that the people who lived in this house before I moved in had the foresight to plant a large lovely blue hydrangea by my front door. I thought I would go to this Canadian garden because my mom wanted to, but it turns out it was really fun, and I had a great time. Like, I got all into which flowers were which, and why didn’t we see anyone gardening, because clearly it was so high maintenance that there’s a lot of work to be done; the aesthetics of Japanese vs. French gardens (Mom is pretty anti both of those); did we like more fluffly flowers or something more “architectural” like calla lilies; why some roses don’t have fragrance; what made the Italian Garden Italian; why there were no koi in the Japanese Garden, so on and so forth. It was a gorgeous day and there were lots of people there, but it was still pretty mellow, and the best part was that a lot of the people there were gardening freaks, all murmuring about how they can never grow camellias like this at home, and how they wouldn’t have thought to have a border here, but now that they thought about it, it made sense. This was especially funny when it was English people, for some reason. I think anything said in a British accent become more interesting automatically.
We spent a lot of time in the gift shop, and went to dinner at a really nice restaurant in the garden itself…we ate on the “lower conservatory” level, which I thought was just great. A conservatory! Doesn’t that sound nice? I also think mushroom soup and crab cakes are great, so all in all it was succesful dinner. By the time we got back to the hotel we were still pretty tired, and so there was nothing for it but to order room service dessert and watch the sun set over the harbor and then be grateful for the down comforters.
The next day we had reservations for tea at the Empress Hotel. This is one of the big things to do in Victoria, apparently. I was pretty excited about it, because, you know, tea sandwiches, and pretty dresses, and being proper. I used to dream about being proper as a little kid. But that wasn’t until the afternoon, and so we went to the utterly fantastic, totally engrossing Royal British Columbia Museum. It’s a good thing we already had reservations for tea, because I think I could have easily spent the entire day there until we had to get back on the boat. Did you guys know I used to work at a museum in Seattle? Yeah, I worked the front desk and retrieved dropped pencils from the dinosaur exhibit. That piddly little thing was no comparison to the RBCM. None. They elevated the sadly neglected art of the diorama to a sublime level. We saw a great IMAX movie about whales which was, I’m not kidding, thrilling, and thankfully did not show any footage of baby humpbacks being eaten by orcas like I thought it might. (Confidential to R at the ABL: I picked up some new techniques for the next time I go swimming at your house. Did you know that humpback whales catch krill by swimming in a circle blowing bubbles to make a net, and then one whale gives the signal, and then all the other whales rocket up through the middle of the circles with their mouths wide open? Yeah, it’s pretty cool. We’ll work on it.). We also saw this very funny trippy exhibit about a dude going into a bathysphere who has an out-of-body experience. “Bathysphere” is my new favorite word. Next to “mugwort.” We saw this whole thing about the British Royalty, and there was this little old lady docent (wearing a Union Jack vest) explaining about Wallis Simpson: “Well, she was a lovely woman, but you know, we weren’t quite sure we wanted her for Queen. She’d been twice divorced, you see.” We saw another exhibit about British Columbia a hundred years ago, with a re-created milliner’s shop and printing press and a mine and a logging camp with a working water wheel. I was so impressed by the level of detail and the skill of the curators…I mean, someone has to create every clump of mud and stick feathers into every model of a duck, and everything. I was captivated. And for some reason, on the boat to Victoria, all of a sudden the word “goat” became really funny to my mom and I, and she kept baa-ing (no, really) in my ear so that no one else could hear, and I kept laughing, and people kept staring at us. I mean, rightly so, people baa-ing and giggling all over the place. So when we saw a stuffed mountain goat in the museum, I didn’t even look at her, but I could sense the gleam in her eye. She whispered, “You don’t know when, and you don’t know where, but that goat is coming for you.” I had to run away and look at an exhibit of Marshland Birds to keep my composure.
So it was in high spirits (and nice dresses) that we went to tea at the Empress. You go into this very ornate pink and green room and you sit at a very pretty lacquered table in soft armchairs, and you look at all the other tourists having tea, and you learn about the history of afternoon tea (some duchess got a “sinking feeling” around four every afternoon, and I don’t blame her). You put sugar lumps in your tea, or, if you’re my mom, you have champagne garnished with a strawberry. You eat the tea sandwiches, and the fruit tarts, and the scones with cream and jam. Maybe you sneak one of the little jam jars they give you into your pocket. You sit back and feel so fancy and yet so serene, and everything you say is sort of silly, but you don’t care. This is the absolute perfect thing to do with your mom, I have to tell you.
We had only a little while before we booked back to the Clipper, so we used our time wisely and headed to the mythical Lush. I had heard about this store but hadn’t realized it would be so cool. I consider myself a low-maintenance kind of girl, as I don’t wear makeup and don’t really have a hairstyle. I’ve recently started moisturizing. But still, all the body and bath and face goop was so cool, I just wanted to eat it. I was trying to get some presents, and so I asked one of the very cute salesgirls what she recommended, and she asked if I was buying for someone with oily or dry skin. I said, “Well, I don’t know, we haven’t really got to the point in our relationship where we’ve discussed our skin types, ” and all the salesgirls heard me say it, and they all thought I was really funny, and then we were all talking about the Talk you have to have with your girlfriends after knowing each other for a certain amount of time…”Uh, Petunia, I hope this won’t sound too weird, but I was wondering…how’s your T-zone? Do you use cream or gel moisturizer? And, uh, I know we don’t know each other that well yet, but…soap or body wash?” I finally chose some yummy stuff, as well as some hand cream for myself, and we had just enough time to grab our bags and get on the boat and settle down and look out the window and read books and enjoy the beautiful afternoon.
Reading this over, I see that I’m making it sound as if the best part of the trip was the Garden, or the Museum, or tea, or beauty products. Not so. The best part was just being with my mom, enjoying the unique sensation of being taken care of by her but also being kind of silly with her, talking about all sorts of things, wandering around doing whatever we wanted. Everything we did was just twice as fun since we got to do it together. She’s in Portland at the moment, but she’ll be back tomorrow, and we’ll have several more days together. I don’t even care, really, what we do, just because being together is so good for my heart.