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Butchart Gardens is one of the most spectacular formal gardens in the world and one of the most visited spots in Canada. Located on the site of a former limestone quarry owned by the Butchart family, it was transformed into a floral garden by Jennie Butchart once the limestone was exhausted. The colors of the flowers are stunning, especially during the summer season.

We purchased season passes to the gardens so we could go as often as we liked, and we eventually went a half dozen times. Butchart Gardens has live music outdoors every night at 8 PM and we attended twice, once for a musician from Senegal in West Africa and once for a bluegrass band from Vancouver. Who would have guessed that there is an excellent bluegrass band in western Canada?

Butchart Gardens also offers a boat tour around the adjacent Tod Inlet, which we took a couple of times. We saw a bald eagle, lots of small jellyfish, and a colony of purple martins that spend the summer in Canada before migrating to Brazil.

With Friends at Butchart

We enjoyed our visits to Hatley Castle and Gardens, about a 10 minute drive from our condo. The castle and gardens were constructed in the early 1900s by James Dunsmuir, heir to a coal and lumber fortune and one of the wealthiest men in British Columbia. His children squandered the fortune and in 1940 the castle and grounds became a Canadian military college. In 1995 the military closed their facility and it became Royal Roads University, a part of the BC education system to provide advanced degree training for professionals.

We toured the castle and gardens but our favorite discovery was a series of hiking trails on the Royal Roads campus and in the nearby woods. Our favorite hike, about a mile and a half, began in an evergreen forest, transitioned to a deciduous forest with constantly running streams from local springs, moved on to a meadow covered with blackberry bushes (great for summer picking!), and finally to a seaside lagoon. We took this hike several times a week throughout our stay in Canada and we especially enjoyed the cool, shady walk on hot days. We both agreed that it was our favorite thing on the island.

Hatley Castle and Gardens

Piney Woods at RRU

Picnic with friends at Hatley

On July 4 we took a one hour boat tour through the Victoria Gorge, an inlet leading northwestward from Victoria’s Inner Harbour. The coast of Vancouver Island is very rugged and there are many inlets up and down the island. The Gorge has an urban feel as there are houses, bridges, and a public park all along it.

The boat tour was a good introduction to Victoria. We saw some of the neighborhoods and learned some of the history of the city. Many of the old buildings from the gold rush era in the late 1800s still exist along the shore. Today the Gorge is popular with boaters, fishermen, and even swimmers since the shallow water warms up in the summer.

The 4th of July is just another day in Canada; their big celebration comes three days earlier on Canada Day. But our tour guide’s wife is from the US so he had a small American flag at the back of the boat to celebrate the day.

The Gorge park extends for over a mile, beginning about a mile upstream from downtown. We enjoyed taking walks in the Gorge park along a trail next to the water. But we avoided the Gorge on hot days as there was little shade.

We arrived in Victoria by ferry from Port Angeles, WA, on July 1. It was Canada Day, the 151st anniversary of the founding of the country, so there were lots of Canadian flags and red shirts all around. Festivities were underway at the Inner Harbour so it was crowded and very active. Victoria is the capital of British Columbia and the old parliament building dominates the Inner Harbour.

We drove to our new summer home, a condo at Bear Mountain Golf Resort, about 10 miles west of Victoria. We are not golfers but the condo looked nice, the mountain scenery was beautiful, and the price was right. Our condo overlooked the 18th hole so we watched golfers every day. We learned that much of the game involves tromping around in the bushes looking for your ball. The rest of the game involves riding around in little carts.

We chose Vancouver Island for the summer because we thought it would be cool, but we got fooled. It turned out to be one of the hottest summers on record, with temperatures often well up into the 80s in our hilltop neighborhood. Because it is normally much cooler our unit did not have air conditioning. To compound things, our unit was west-facing and the Canadian sun did not set until after 8 PM, so dinner time was the hottest part of the day. On the warmest days we went to the movies just to cool off.

We had lots of smoke from wildfires in mid to late August. At one point, there were more than 500 fires burning in BC, most started by lightning. On several days we could smell the smoke, it was so thick.  We were not threatened by any fires nearby but there were big fires in the northern part of Vancouver Island and on the British Columbia mainland, all up and down the province. Parts of the Alaska Highway were closed due to fires.

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We took a day trip to Bisbee, about 100 miles southeast of Tucson. Bisbee was founded in 1880 as a copper, gold, and silver mining town. The huge open pit copper mines are still visible on the edge of town. But the Bisbee copper ore was of poor quality and by the 1970s mining was no longer financially viable and the last mine closed. The miners left town and property values plummeted. But poor artists and hippies discovered they could buy a house for almost nothing and so Bisbee was reborn as an art and tourist center, as it remains today.

The old part of Bisbee is built upon steep hills on either side of a deep gulch. We wanted to explore the interesting old buildings but we didn’t want to drive on the treacherous narrow streets and we definitely didn’t want to climb the steep hills on foot! So we took a 1-hour tour of the town on the back of a golf cart. Our tour guide, a Bisbee native, was very informative and we got to see many interesting homes and commercial buildings, so it was worth the expense.

We took several day trips to the region between Tucson and the Mexican Border at Nogales. One day we went all the way to Nogales, Arizona, and did some exploring. We especially enjoyed the Pimeria Alta Historical Society Museum, a small museum with fascinating displays about the history of Nogales and the border region. The docent, a Nogales native, was around 70 years old so she had lots of stories about Nogales and its past; she was very interesting. Believe it or not, a hundred years ago or so the sister cities of Nogales Arizona and Sonora were separated only by a dirt street, and people crossed the border at will. That’s a far cry from the big wall that separates the two cities now. The museum had a special exhibit of items from Bracker’s department store, a favorite of wealthy Mexicans who would cross the border to shop. Founded in 1924, Bracker’s went out of business just a year or so ago. After the peso was devalued most Mexicans could no longer afford to shop there.

The twin cities of Nogales were founded in the 1800s as a location to connect the US and Mexican railroad systems. Today Nogales is a major transportation point for commerce between the US and Mexico. The north side of Nogales hosts dozens of truck depots. Trucks bring their loads from Mexico, mostly Mexican produce, and their loads are inspected and then loaded onto US trucks to go to US markets. Shipping is the backbone of the economy in Nogales, Arizona.

We found a great little Mexican seafood restaurant on a back road in Nogales, Arizona. Never would have found it without a Google Maps search for restaurants!

On another day we visited Tumacacori National Historical Park, north of Nogales. The park consists of the ruins and grounds of one of the old Spanish missions. Father Kino, who came to be beloved by the indigenous people, founded as string of missions in what is now Arizona and Sonora. There is a small museum associated with the park.

We also made a stop at nearby Tubac, an artist colony with lots of galleries showcasing southwestern art. We had been to Tubac several times on previous visits to Arizona. We ate at an interesting restaurant, Elvira’s, which served a unique take on Mexican food.

Our final visit to the border region was unexpectedly interesting, the Titan Missle Museum. During the Cold War, beginning in the 1960s, there was a network of missle silos in Arizona, Arkansas, and Kansas. They housed Titan II missles equipped with nuclear warheads, ready to be launched if needed. Most were decommissioned in the 1980s but one silo, near Tucson, was retained for historical purposes (the nuclear warhead was removed, of course). We were able to tour the underground silo and view the missle as well as the control room. Our tour guide had worked at the silo himself so he was able to provide interesting insights.

Walt drove over from Camarillo to spend a few days with us in late May. He lived in Saddlebrooke, just north of Tucson, for many years and still owns a house there. We had a chance to check out the old house and neighborhood and to have a couple of meals in the community clubhouse.

We also did some sightseeing while Walt was visiting. He loves cactus so we paid a visit to one of his favorite spots, Bach’s Cactus Nursery. Bach’s is a wonderful place to walk around. They have several greenhouses and lots of outdoor plants. It’s like being in an arboretum.

One day we drove up to Mt. Lemmon, atop the Catalina Mountains just north of Tucson. At around 9,000 feet in elevation it’s a popular spot for Tucson residents to escape the desert heat. Mt. Lemmon Ski Valley operates through the winter. It is the southernmost ski area in the United States.

Bach’s Cactus Nursery

Mt. Lemmon

We spent part of a day exploring the El Presidio Historic District, the oldest part of Tucson. The city began as a small cluster of buildings near the Santa Cruz River, a reliable water source in the harsh desert climate. A number of these buildings have been restored to their original conditions and they provide a glimpse into how Tucson might have looked a hundred years ago or more. Nearby, some residences have been “gentrified” and have transformed parts of El Presidio into a desirable place to live. We had lunch at one of our old favorites, El Charro Cafe, in business since 1922.

The Tucson Museum of Art is at the edge of El Presidio so we spent some time there. We are members of the California State Railroad Museum in Sacramento and we get free admission to many museums across the country through a reciprocal agreement. The Tucson Museum features southwestern art. We were fortunate to be there during a special exhibit of hand-woven rugs from Sonora. There were many beautiful pieces, along with descriptions of the techniques used by the weavers. The rugs came from the collection of Gloria Giffords, mother of the former congresswoman from Tucson, Gabby Giffords. When Gabby was a girl the family would take roadtrips to Sonora, searching out new weavers and new pieces.

We were very fortunate to be on the northwest edge of Tucson and just a short drive from the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum and Saguaro National Park. Both are in the Tucson Mountains and provide spectacular desert scenery. The Desert Museum is more than just a museum – it includes a zoo, and arboretum, an aviary, and indoor exhibits about the desert. We purchased a museum membership so we could return repeatedly, which we did. Among the highlights were a lecture on Gila monsters and rattlesnakes with an example of each (safely at the front of the auditorium) and “Cool Summer Nights” when the museum stays open until 10 PM so you can observe the animals as the sun goes down.

Saguaro National Park has several short hiking trails that allow you to get out into the desert vegetation. The park has one of the greatest stands of saguaro cactus in the world, with saguaros covering the desert mountains. We were fortunate to be in Tucson during the saguaro blooming period in May and early June. Every day from our patio we saw new white blossoms on top of the saguaros.

We arrived in Tuscon to begin a stay of almost two months. Carrie’s mom and stepfather lived in Tucson for many years and we always enjoyed visiting so we wanted to return for an extended stay. Late spring promised some warm, sunny weather in advance of the desert heat that is common in midsummer.

Our house was located on the northwest edge of the city, far enough away from urban development that it felt like we were out in the desert. Our casita was associated with a main house a short distance away and we shared a pool, which was wonderful on hot days. Our patio and dining room window looked out at palo verde trees, saguaros, mesquite trees, and other desert vegetation. We could see a few other houses in the distance, but otherwise we were secluded.

The house had a bird feeder, hummingbird feeder, and birdbaths in the backyard so there was a constant stream of birds (mostly doves, quail, and hummingbirds) as well as rabbits and lizards. On a few occasions we also saw deer, coyotes, and bobcats. We never saw a rattlesnake in our yard, but Charlie saw one along the road about a mile from our house when he was out on a walk. It was always necessary to watch your step carefully because rattlesnakes can be hiding near rocks and plants. Our next door neighbor was bitten by a rattlesnake last year while clearing some brush in his yard.

We both like to walk and there were good desert walks around our neighborhood. The weather was getting warm so we would typically walk in the early morning. When the weather started getting warmer Carrie often chose to walk in the Tucson Mall, which is quite large. Apparently lots of people in Tucson like to do that.

Most of our rentals have been managed by a property manager who we never saw. In this case, however, the owner, Carella, lived right next door in the main house, along with her little dog, Maisie. It was a pleasure to get to know Carella; we soon felt like we were neighbors.

Click on the first picture to see the pictures enlarged, and click the arrows to view the slide show.