This post is Part Two about our 2018 summer vacation road trip adventure to the Pacific Northwest and Canada. You can read Part One here.

I hadn’t been to Victoria since I was a kid. Andrew had never been at all. Part of the reason we wanted to head north of the border was to have the excuse to ride on the ferry. The other was to go to Butchart Gardens. I’ve heard it is a breathtaking tourist attraction and I wanted to go see if for myself.

When you want to take your car to Victoria by ferry, there is only one option: take a vehicle passenger ferry that leaves out of Port Angeles, WA. Thankfully there are several trips made per day. Accessibility on a vehicle ferry is tricky because of the way they load the cars. They pack them in so tightly there is no room to let down the van ramp. We hadn’t made arrangements prior, so on the way over we had stay in our van and ride over in the belly of the boat. It wasn’t the most ideal, but the trip was only like 90 minutes, and we were just thankful to be headed on our way. (Going home we were able to load our van first so we could exit it before other cars got parked in around us. So we were able to scoot upstairs via the exterior ramp to the passenger/viewing levels.)