The First of a Few Vacation Posts

I returned from a multi-year blogging hiatus with high hopes and plans for at least weekly posts.  That has not happened.  One reason is that I have been exhausted.  Another reason was that I was on vacation and exhausted.  We spent a week in Victoria, British Columbia and wore ourselves out loving it.  There was enough going on that I think there are a few posts-worth of items to discuss.  Let's talk about the first of them - food.

First, because we travel using our timeshare, we always have a kitchen.  As a result, we are always going to Costco, if there is one.  It is fun to see the regional differences between Costcos. For example, in Las Vegas, we go to the Centennial Costco.  We are accustomed to it. It is our baseline.  However, when we go even to the Summerlin Costco, also in Las Vegas, there are some notable differences.  First, the people are fancier (and sometimes more fun to watch) than at our home Costco.  Second, they have gelato.  $1.50 for pretty good gelato.  Classic Costco move.  So, on our first day in Canada, we had to go to Costco.  

Our journey to Costco was somewhat complicated.  I decided it was stupid to pay for an international phone and data plan on this trip.  So, my phone was a battery powered brick except when I was in wi-fi territory.  As such, navigation using my phone was out of the question.  So, I got to use maps and my innate sense of direction.  My innate sense of direction is really really good.  We got to Costco and the differences were few, but significant.  

Costco was CRAZY busy, as all Costcos are on Saturday.  The biggest difference?  The snack bar.  Our home Costco has pizza, hot dogs, some salads and weird sandwiches/melts and frozen yogurts.  The Victoria Costco had pizza (Hawaiian pizza was an option, I noticed this at more than one place, do Canadians love Hawaiian Pizza?  Is it the Canadian bacon?), hot dogs, soft serve (Canadians seem to be into soft-serve ice cream instead of frozen yogurt and as long as that persists, we will be more cultured than Canada - sorry about the pun) and Poutine (emphasis on the "ine").  

 

Some of you, who don't personally know me, don't know that I am a fan of poutine.  It's a Canadian invention (almost as good as the Canadian arm on the American space shuttle), where you take crispy French fries, cover them in brown gravy and add white cheese curds.  It's a wondrous thing and, of course, Costco's version was delicious. 

 

The fries seemed to be of the beer battered variety, an excellent choice, as it made them extra crispy and better able to stand up to the gravy.  They had little individual cheese curd bags so yours was always fresh and not waterlogged.  It was great.  We almost had it twice.

Another interesting difference was side bacon.  As a Yank, one grows up thinking Canadian bacon is that dry, round ham that is good on pizza with pineapple.  Thus, shouldn't Canadians be cooking their special "bacon" with every breakfast plate?  Nope.  They have "normal" bacon, but they don't slice it and sell it as  "side bacon."  I didn't see this at my Costco. 

 

Side bacon is really the same as our bacon here in the states.  We bought a chunk and I sliced of some slices every morning for breakfast.  It was fantastic.  The flavor was a little different from the standard US bacon, but it was still familiar.

The last difference between my Costco and the Costco on Vancouver Island, was not as tasty.  In the States (why don't we call Canada "the provinces"?), for years and years, Costco has accepted and given out American Express credit cards.  It just now switched to a Visa.  In Canada, it was MasterCard.  In fact, the gas pumps would not accept my AMEX membership card or credit card.  

That's it for now.  There will be an upcoming post on candy and maybe another one on some Canadian eating we did while in Victoria.  There will definitely be one or two posts on the beautiful things we saw while there.