For those who don't cruise much, you may find it interesting to learn that every US cruise must include an international port. Why you ask? There is this law that requires every foreign flagged cruise ship (ie, you're technically "based" in that foreign country) to visit an international port on a journey before returning to a US port to pick up more passengers. Foreign flagged by ships are able to avoid various US employment, gambling, etc laws. This is why the Pride of America cruise by Norwegian, which only cruises amongst the Hawaiian islands, is the only major cruise ship that is a US flagged ship, does not have a casino, and is staffed entirely by US workers.
So, because of this rule, all Alaska cruises include some stop in Canada. For us, it's Victoria, BC.
We dock at 3 pm today so it's more like a half day again. That meant we had time in the morning for more shipboard activities. I actually made the kids go line dancing with me today! I had a good time...the kids...lasted two songs at least.
They were very happy to escape off the ship to Canada.
I was sad I couldn't make it to the famous Butchart gardens (they close early on Mondays) but it left us more than enough time for High Tea at the Fairmont Empress!
Here is a shot of the twins being duly impressed by the tea set on display that was used by Queen Elizabeth when she visited.
The tea was a fairly typical high tea get up -- I thought the scones were particularly nice -- nice and fluffy and soft. The kids were partial to the coronation chicken sandwiches.
The Empress tea blend was a surprise -- since we had a group of eight, we actually tried out a bunch of different teas and the Empress was by far my favorite. Since it was the day before Ian's birthday, they actually gifted Ian a box of the Empress tea as a special birthday gift!
After downing a lot of clotted cream and sweets...we reconsidered my original plan to take a tour of the city by horse drawn carriage and opted to walk instead. They were very pretty horses though!
Here's a family shot with the Parliament building.
Twins at the harbor. I will credit the twins with this -- they may be tired and cranky and complaining...but as soon as I say I'm taking a picture, they immediately pose with very nice smiles. 😆
Yes, that is in fact a boba tea cup in each of their hands. Apparently pots of tea and trays of scones do not fill up the extra stomach each twin keeps just for boba.
Nor apparently does afternoon tea fill Ian's special stomach compartment for pork buns.
Are you thinking...boba tea...bbq pork bao...yes that's right, we walked to Victoria's Chinatown -- the oldest a Chinatown in Canada and the second oldest in North America! (Second only to our very own San Francisco).
After the Chinatown visit we slowly walked back to the ship - this was our last port day.
The end of the cruise is creeping up on us. Thank goodness we still have two whole sea days left before we get back home though!
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