Tag Archives: travel

Three Years of Building Progress

One of our earlier visits to Victoria had involved staying close by a building that was being demolished. They were keeping the façade of the building intact and taking out the interior for rebuilding and development. Three years has gone by since that visit and I was interested to see how the building was looking. While some finishing and fit out still appears to be underway, the building appears to be complete.

They have retained the façade as anticipated and constructed a whole new building inside. In addition, one source of the building had been removed to allow the demolition process to get underway and that now has a new structure grafted on to the building. Consequently, there is a combination of the old and the modern in the way it is finished off. I assume by the next time we are in Victoria, it will be open for business. I don’t know when it was originally scheduled to be done but I assume the pandemic delayed things a little.

The Twelve Days of Christmas

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I posted previously about the Christmas lights at Butchart Gardens but I separately kept the theme of the Twelve Days of Christmas for its own post. There is a route that you follow through the gardens to see the illuminations and along that route are a series of scenes for the twelve days. The first one you come to is clearly the partridge in a pear tree and you go from there.

I share each of the shots in turn to illustrate what they have. Some are pretty straightforward. Six geese a’laying is not obscure. The Four Calling Birds had a few people puzzle until they realized that they had cellphones. I found the French Hens pretty amusing. The leaping lords were frogs behind a wall and they came up in a varying pattern. Getting a shot with most of them in required some patience. The pipers were just a bit creepy for me.

When you finish walking around the gardens, you think something is wrong. You are back at the start and you haven’t seen twelve drummers drumming. The reason for that is that they are on the arches over the road that exits the gardens from the parking lot. If you aren’t paying attention, you could easily miss them. We had seen this previously but I had forgotten and it was a little while before I remembered and looked off from the area near the gift shop and saw them. The arms of the drummers do move but the photos won’t tell that tale.

Butchart Gardens Christmas Lights 2021

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Our visit to Victoria over the Thanksgiving holiday coincided with the first nights of the Christmas lights at Butchart Gardens. Pre-booking a time was necessary with COVID precautions in effect but we had planned ahead so that was taken care of. We actually got there earlier in the afternoon to have a wander around while there was still some light before taking a full walk around again when the lights were at their most effective.

There will be a separate post on the Christmas theme to the lights. For this post, I am going to share some shots of the general lighting of the gardens. We were there two years ago and they don’t change much between each year. I think there is a small change each year and that is fine with me because it really looks fantastic. Conveying the impression of the lighting in photos is tricky because the way the eye sees things in the dark is different to the camera with the darks being too dark or the lights blowing out.

However, I hope these shots give some idea of the way it looked. On our previous visit, I had been blown away by the use of green lasers to illuminate the undersides of the trees creating a star-like effect under the foliage. That was there again and looked just as good. I did think to look backwards as we walked around – it is easy to get fixated on what is ahead of you – and that area looked great from a distance too. This time there was an area with some red lasers and, while on a smaller scale, it looked very effective too.

Butchart Gardens is worth a visit at any time of year but, if you get to go for the Christmas lights, do take the opportunity. It is a lovely display and it is very tastefully done. There are plenty of gaudy light displays and, while this one is not understated, it certainly is still tasteful.

Island Ferry Terminals

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The San Juan Islands were our escape a couple of times during the limits on travel that COVID provided. Getting to the islands involves a ferry trip and I will always enjoy that. One of the things that I find interesting about the ferry terminals on the islands is how simple they are. When we lived in the UK, the ferries were constantly expanding in their usage and the terminals were all getting upgraded to accommodate more vehicles. They also had shops and food outlets.

The San Juans are far lower key. The terminals are often in remote locations (accepting that the islands are generally pretty remote anyway) and they are tucked away looking far more like part of the coastline. As we travel on the ferries, we get to see some that we stop at and others we pass. Here are a few of the ones I have photographed from the water.

Minor League Baseball at Victory Field

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Having looked through the catalog of images after finding the elevated view of Victory Field, I came across the shots I took when I went with some work colleagues to a minor league game there. It was a lot of fun although I have no idea how the game was. Watching baseball at a stadium is an enjoyable experience that happens alongside a baseball game as far as I am concerned.

The sun was setting as the game got underway and we had some nice light in the sky. I took some HDR and panoramic shots which I have been able to reprocess using the latest versions of Lightroom as opposed to the one available at that time. I also got a few shots of the players at work and had a wander around the perimeter of the field to see how it looked from different angles. Looks like I was using a rather wide angle lens at some point too.

Back to Cascade Falls

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On our previous trip to Orcas, we took in Cascades Falls as part of a hike. We repeated the hike this time but, since we started a little earlier in the day and the days were longer, we didn’t have quite the same pressure to make sure we got back before things got dark. Consequently, when we got to Cascade Falls, I was able to spend a bit more time taking the diversion down to the river to see the falls from lower angles and get some images and video that I hadn’t had a go at on the previous visit. While everything was a lot warmer than last time, there had been a fair bit of rain recently which meant the falls still had a good flow coming over them. As is the way with waterfalls, they look more impressive when you are at the bottom than when you are above them.

Competitor Dreamliners

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I took this shot at Haneda Airport in Tokyo. The 787 has sold well with the Japanese carriers – my trip to Tokyo was on a JAL 787-8 and ANA was the launch operator – and with these two airlines competing strongly for the Japanese market, it seemed slightly appropriate that they should both be in this single shot.

Zipair

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There is some rationalization underway in the Japanese airline business at the moment. JAL and ANA are both taking control over smaller operations as a result of the difficulties that COVID has placed upon them. However, even before COVID reared its ugly head, JAL had created a new subsidiary. This is called Zipair. I recently read that it is due to start operations soon which surprised me because I thought I had seen its planes before. It turns out I saw one of their 787s as it was parked up at Narita when the flight I was on was taxiing in after landing. I guess that airframe hasn’t had much use yet.

Royal Navy Warships at Portsmouth

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My aerial photo searches brought me to some shots of the Royal Navy’s dockyard at Portsmouth. One or two shots from this were used in a post about a flight I took with Pete but not very many. Flying over the home of the Royal Navy, we got to see a bunch of ships – large and small. HMS Bristol was moored for use as a training ship. I think she may have now been relieved of that duty so don’t know whether she is still around and for how long.

Plenty of frigates were moored alongside and there were surplus Type 42 destroyers at various locations too. This got me thinking about a day many years ago when we were in Portsmouth for some reason. We took a trip around the harbour in a sightseeing boat and I got a few shots of some ships then too so these are interspersed here. Now the arrival of the two carriers to the fleet would mean a good chance of getting a far larger vessel alongside. Might have to think about doing something like this again at some point when I am in the UK.

Olga

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All of the communities on Orcas Island are small but Olga, despite being pretty tiny, had caught my attention because of its store. Currently closed, this had been a long lived facility. The community is currently working to try and get it opened up again. I imagine it is going to be a struggle since there aren’t too many customers within range. Hopefully they can do something. We stopped off and had a brief wander around the area near the store and down to the water’s edge. With the sun out, it was a tranquil spot, even if we did wonder whether someone was going to come out and ask us what we were doing there. (They didn’t but we did feel like we were an oddity there.)