Exploring in the rain (ugh, just like Juneau)

The conference I was at ended Friday and mom got into town on Friday afternoon.  Since it was valentine's day and we figured restaurants would be busy, we headed out early to find dinner.  We ended up at a good Tex-Mex place where we had to eat at the bar (at 5 pm!) because the restaurant was already booked up for the whole night.  Yikes!  I hope everyone had a great Valentines Day!

The sunken garden.  The tower in the distance is an old cement stack.

This morning we walked (before the rain started) to pick up a rental car and headed right to Butchart Gardens.  Even though it's winter, there was a lot of flowers outside, and a lot of green stuff too.  We were lucky at the gardens - it only sprinkled a little bit and it was really quiet there so we didn't have a lot of other people to compete with.

Most of the gardens are outdoors, but there was a small indoor section too.  These orchids were inside.

The gardens were really beautiful.  I think in summer they would be even better, though there would be a lot more people (I bet there were less than a dozen people in the whole place while we were there).  Even without leaves on a lot of plants there were a lot of colors and textures.  My favorite part was the sunken garden (above) but the Japanese garden (below) was a close second.

After wandering the gardens for a couple of hours we headed up the west coast of Vancouver Island (in the pouring rain) towards Port Renfrew.  We stopped at a small park with a beach and saw this sign, which is my favorite image from all of today.  

You kind of have to zoom in to see the expression on the stick-man's face as he's chased by the long-necked bear.  Hilarious.  (and true)

The coast here is beautiful!  We don't really get much in the way of waves in Juneau because we're in inside waters, with lots of big islands between us an the ocean, so this was fun.  We turned back a bit before we reached Port Renfrew because it was getting dark.