Life at the Narrow End of the Bell-Shaped Curve: That's Just SO Two Months Ago

Finally -- we're nearing the end of our epic journey that only feels -- because of delays in my posting the photos! -- like it's taken over two months!

We stayed at this lovely bed & breakfast in Victoria:

It's right across the street from Canada House, the official residence of someone important. In fact, as we walked into town the first day, we saw someone important -- not the resident of the house in question, but a visitor. Still you can tell it's someone important when the car is a luxury town car (Jaguar? Mercedes? something like that) and it's got flags all over it.

Hub 1.0 and me on the porch. Our hostess was a lovely woman who did all the work. Our host was a voluble man who made all the recommendations as to where we should eat. It seems somehow fitting that the only bit of Sarah Palin's speech at the Republican Convention I saw was on the TV in the sitting room at this B&B.

This is Craigdarroch, a stately home open to the public -- it was right around the corner from the B&B -- we were clearly staying in a tony neighborhood! Actually, the point is that it used to be a tony neighborhood -- the mining tycoon who had Craigdarroch built owned a good bit of land, but when his widow died and the kids inherited, a lot of that land was sold and developed into more conventional suburban plots.

Craigdarroch is another pastiche of the stately English home that you find from time to time in North America. Inside is lots of lovely woodwork and stained glass windows; the original furnishings didn't survive because the building was used as a school for many years, and as a nursing home (I think; it's been a while). The current caretakers have gotten some furniture from the period, but it's the building itself that's worth visiting.

No particular reason -- I'm a sucker for early 20th Century children's book art. (Hey, I've spared you the photos I took of the floral collage entirely done in dried seeds -- so Victorian!)

This one's for Hub 1.0 -- this is a finial at the top of the curved staircase. This is precisely the sort of thing that gets Hub 1.0 to declare, "He's rather sweet!"

The view from Canada House (or whatever it was called). The gardens were open, and on some occasion Hub 1.0 and Starman wandered over for a longer walk. This and the following photos are their choices of what to photograph, so where with me you'd have gotten more flowers, with them you get -- well, you'll see.