Time Travel (again?)

"So what in the world does that image have to do with your travel in British Columbia?" I'm so glad you asked :)

We started off the day doing the typical tourist outing: off to the famed Butchard Gardens, outside Victoria. Very beautiful if you're into that sort of thing but I quickly found out I'm not: past the first few manicured spreads of flowers, everything just started looking the same. And the tons of other people who had the same idea we did just contributed to the 'rounding of the cattle' feeling.

So we headed out and as we drove down the road, we spotted this little sign saying "Saanich Historical Artifacts Society" and just had to investigate. And what a super and pleasant surprise that was! It's apparently a group of volunteers who have the hobby of finding historical (well, old) things and restoring them: that includes cars, trucks, boats, and even entire buildings! So that was oodles of fun. But wait: it's not over yet!

As we walked around, we heard the distinctive tooting of an old locomotive, so off we went to follow that clue. Turns out the Vancouver Island Model Engineers club is housed there too and was holding a model train show. And by model, I don't mean the little toys running under the Christmas tree, but miniaturized trains that carry passengers and loads and run on a couple of miles of tracks. By the time we got there,the show was over, but this one guy was working on his steam locomotive so we chatted him up. Four hours later, we now had a new friend, a complete history of the place and everything that went into it, and, of course, a private run of the tracks on his machine. How cool is that?! :)) My blip today is of the coal (miniaturized as well) he puts into the engine of his locomotive to steam her up.

For any of you who are in the area, you should really take the time to go visit that place and get the word out to your own friends: everything is done by volunteers and through donations and it's wonderful. When I get back to DC and can stay put for a bit, I plan on doing a photo essay on that topic. For now, if you'd like to see some of the pictures of the model train, here they are.