Day 3

Day 3 started with breakfast at a place called Jasmine's Family Restaurant. Our waitress was a cute Asian lady who informed us that the kitchen staff were ninja fast.

When in a different region, I like to eat like the natives. (Well, to a certain extent, anyway.) Therefore, for breakfast, I ordered Eggs Benedict, or "Eggs Benny" as the British Columbians affectionately call it. It's ham on an english muffin, topped with a poached egg and then covered in Hollandaise sauce (which I ordered on the side).

This, my friends, is a poached egg:


Pretty weird looking, huh? It looks like it was cooked while traveling at light speed.

The bacon we ordered looked quite American to me:


But, who knows? Maybe "Canadian Bacon" is just about as Canadian as "French Fries" are French.

After breakfast, we ventured out to find a few of these:


Look hard at the following pictures because you're not likely to see me on a horse again for awhile.



Here's our guide, Christine, a German transplant, who took us around Elk Lake:

It was such a beautiful area. Jeff took a lot of pictures but a lot of them came out blurry since he was getting bumped around on the top of a horse.

Jeff rode Roxie. Tobias had Bandit. I was on Lexie and Delaney had Trixie. I see a bit of an "xie" theme.

Delaney said this was her favorite part of the trip. Yay! I chose well.

That afternoon, we drove over to:


A week or so earlier, I told Jeff, "There's something I'm planning for you and the kids to do, but I will NOT be participating, so I want it clear in your head that I won't be talked into it." This, of course, piqued his curiosity.

The adventures that this place offers are excellent for people who enjoy this kind of thing, but for someone like me...I'd much rather spend my $40+ doing something else. The other three in my clan, however, loved it.

To simply call it a ropes course place doesn't quite do it justice. There's a bit of climbing, balancing, zip-lining, swinging, etc.

First, everyone got harnessed up.


We're too sexy for this safety gear:


My three Tarzan wannabes:


The management is smart. They first take you through a training course which is low enough to the ground that they can see you've learned the safety protocol of all the dos and don'ts. Here's the teacher, teaching:


Once a participant passes the I'm-not-likely-to-fall-and-die test, they are set free to go play.

There were three color-coded courses available. (My three bypassed the "kids" course.) Once you started a course, you had to go through it to completion, so you needed to ask yourself if you had the strength, will and guts before you started the next level. Black was the most difficult course. The guide told me she thought the designers were just being mean when they planned it out.

Like flies on a web:

Yes, I was there. See?


Man, look at how high those black course platforms are above me! Yikes...

That night I wanted to eat dinner at a place called Red Fish, Blue Fish, but they closed at 5:00 pm! Go figure. Cruising around, we found a shwarma place where Jeff and I wanted to eat. The kids aren't real big on Lebanese food so we were happy to see a pizza place practically next door.

The funny thing about this pizza place was that it was called Ali Baba's Pizza. Now last time I checked, pizza was Italian, not Arabic, so the name wasn't winning me over. I mean, would you want to eat at Vladimir's Tacos or Lupe's Sushi? However, the kids were just glad to be eating pizza instead of hummus, so we went inside to get them situated before we went next door to Beirut Express.

Well, this Ali Baba character must have spent some time in Italy because Tobias let me have a bite of his huge slice of pizza and it was about the best pizza I've ever had.

Yum, yum.

The crust was unbelievable and you could taste the fresh herbs in the sauce. Honestly, if you're ever in Victoria, seek out the ill-named pizzeria.