Victoria: My Elegant Alaska Finish

We arrived at 6 p.m. and Victoria was pure magic in evening light. Standing at the rail as we glided past the Inner Harbour, I thought about the Lekwungen people — the Songhees and Esquimalt Nations — who've known these waters for thousands of years before James Douglas stepped ashore on March 14, 1843 to plant Fort Camosack for the Hudson's Bay Company. Three months later they renamed it Fort Victoria in honor of the young Queen, and by January 1849 all of Vancouver Island became a Crown colony.

Our shuttle traced the old roads out to Butchart Gardens, which began in 1904 when Jennie Butchart looked at her husband's exhausted limestone quarry and saw possibility instead of ruin. Now: sunken garden, rose garden, Japanese garden all lit with fairy lights, the air thick with flowers and woodsmoke. I wandered paths carved from industry's bones and marveled at redemption.

Then high tea at the Fairmont Empress — scones with clotted cream, tiny sandwiches, 15 teas to choose. Felt like royalty in a city that grew from fur-trade outpost to Gold Rush boomtown after 1858, bursting so fast that by November 1864 they'd demolished the old fort to make room for commerce. Yet they never forgot: in 1924 the site became a National Historic Site, memory preserved even as the city reached upward.

Walked Inner Harbour at night with Parliament glowing gold and buskers playing bagpipes. The buildings stood where the fort once guarded, where Indigenous peoples fished and traded long before European sails appeared on the horizon. History layered like sediment beneath my feet.