Notes from the Event Director
Why Victoria is worth the long trip out
I've had some version of the same conversation a dozen times this year. Someone pulls up flights from Houston or Paducah or New Orleans, sees that getting to Vancouver Island involves an extra connection and possibly a boat, and asks me, very politely, whether we couldn't have picked a city with a runway you can land a 737 on.
Fair question. It's a haul! But here's my pitch for why it's worth the extra travel time.
(Victoria is where Helm started back in 1999, so we're a little biased. But set that aside, because the city makes its own case.)
Start with this: you will not need a car. The Empress sits on the Inner Harbour, and almost everything worth doing is inside a twenty-minute walk of the lobby. The Royal BC Museum is next door. The Parliament Buildings are across the water and get outlined in lights after dark, which is one of those things that sounds like a cliché until you see it from the causeway. Fisherman's Wharf, with the float homes and the fish and chips, is a stroll around the harbor. Chinatown is the oldest in Canada, and Fan Tan Alley, which runs off it, is about a meter wide in places. Walking through it is a strange and memorable few minutes.
Head south instead and you hit Beacon Hill Park, then the Dallas Road waterfront, where the land just stops and the Strait of Juan de Fuca starts. On a clear day the Olympic Mountains sit right there across the water, close enough that they don't look real. Keep going west and you reach the Ogden Point breakwater, which is half a kilometer of concrete running out into open water. It’s windy and loud and worth every step, and if you’re lucky you may even spot some seals or, if you’re extremely lucky, orcas!
Victoria is also a working harbor, not a postcard of one. Float planes land in the middle of downtown, on a schedule, all day. Harbor ferries the size of a bathtub run passenger routes across the water and do a synchronized ballet in the spring that I am not making up. There are also pilot boats, tugs, cruise ships at Ogden Point, and a shipyard up the Upper Harbour. You can sit with a coffee on the causeway and watch a busy piece of water do its job, which can be soothing and fun.
If you build in a spare morning, take a whale watching tour. Late fall is when the humpbacks are feeding hard before they head south, and seeing the Salish Sea from the water is a different thing entirely from seeing it from shore. If you'd rather stay on land, Butchart Gardens is about forty-five minutes north and open year-round. Goldstream Park is running salmon by mid-October, which is one of the more remarkable things you can watch happen for free. And Victoria supports more haunted-history walking tours than a city this size has any business supporting, which makes the week before Halloween exactly the right time to take one.
Food is the easy part. It's a small city with an outsized number of good restaurants, and you can eat very well within a few blocks of the hotel without a reservation made three weeks out. The beer scene is strong too, and most of it is close in.
So here's the ask. Fly in Monday instead of Tuesday morning. Or stay through Friday and give yourself the weekend. The travel day is the hard part, and you've already paid for it by the time you land. Everything after that is the good part.
See you at the Empress, October 20-22.