Victoria is so warm that if you try to skate outdoors, you have to have fake ice. I don’t know whether that’s funny or sad. The rink was little, was ontop of the Mayfair roof, and they had strung white lights across the top, which I’m sure would have looked lovely in the night. The view wasn’t bad, the sunset was all golden and lovely and we rented skates and they had good music, but the ice just wasn’t there. Literally. They made the rink look like ice, but it was like skating on a white cutting board with grease for glide. Couldn’t turn very well, couldn’t get up any speed-well, I could but then I went to turn the curve and then I have no speed. I had fun anyway, but it was just so ridiculous in the end. I never realized how much easier real ice is to skate on, I was expecting a grip and a smooth glide that just wasn’t there. Dev did much better than me, gliding round and round and round, and we stayed as long as we could but I mean really, it was just so weird after all. I’m definitely going to find a better rink for us, and I can’t believe I’ll be asking “so, do you have REAL ice?” when I call to ask when they’re open for public skating.

Been a pretty good weekend. We had Kate’s sister and friend come into town on Sunday. I picked them up from the ferry, and then the adventure began. The plan was to go to the Merridale Cidery. Apparently it was an hour outside of Victoria. So I programmed the address into my GPS and was surprised to see it was only 20km from the ferries. Excellent! we will get there nice and early. Except the GPS wanted us to drive through the ocean. No as much as I would like to have an amphibious car, I don’t have the means to drive through the ocean. Okay fair enough. My GPS could just be screwy. Sometimes that happens with software. So Sharon pulls out her GPS. And the same thing happened again.

Well this is no good. We will just have to head back into town and go from there. We managed to make it back to Victoria, despite the two GPS systems yelling different directions at us in an attempt to prove superiority over the other (we listened to neither at this point). At this point they both start agreeing again, and we start out to the cidery once again. Just to have them send us into off-road/private road routes. Most likely at this point the just wanted to watch the humans dance to their tune. Again we make it back to the highway and drive a bit further, and the system sends us on this long circuitous route. But finally we are there.

So we went in, had our tasting, bought some cider and decided it was time for lunch. It was raining so we sat in the car, and started listening to some music. And apparently we listened to it for a little too long; we killed the battery.

So off to find jumper cables I go. Of course no one has any, and I finally cave and call a tow truck. Right after, Rhian asks some people who just pulled up if they had any jumper cables. Nope. of course not. What the did have however, was muscle power. I drive a standard, and there is this neat trick called a push start. So we push my car down a hill, and thank the gods, it worked.

Of course we still hadn’t learned with the GPS, and we try to follow it back home. Only for it to send us to to the same closed roads. At this point we figure they might as well be speaking Norwegian as the directions from the device were utterly useless. So we sett it to Norwegian, We figured it was actually more helpful this way, as at least we now know how to say “Turn Left”

~Dusk