Victoria (followup)

I left out a few fun things.

On our bus ride back from the Gardens, the bus was jam-packed. Ani and I found a nice open-looking spot near the back door. I ignored the yellow stripe and settled in. At the first stop, we found that the back door automatically (!) opens. It continued to attack us for the remaining 20 stops until we got home. We learned how to properly defend ourselves.

We went to dinner one night at a local pub. The local color was interesting. In particular, we sat next to two older (or just old?) couples. They had fun conversations about tennis (i was stoked) and politics. One lady complimented Anita and I on being a nice couple that reminded her of she and her husband. It was very sweet. Plus, her husband was a Catholic priest, so i think it was a good sign.

Anita challenged me with a couple of puzzles on the trip. The first I won't describe here except to post this link:
door puzzle
Momma and Tess, if you read this before your other (clearly worse) halves, you can challenge them with it. Be careful though, this almost wrecked Anita and I's friendship. I was so sure I was right. But she was the one asking the puzzle question! What an idiot I can be.

The other puzzle is given here. You're gonna have fun with this one. I'll post the answer later. I'll also respond to comments if you're stumped.

A bad guy buries three other guys up to their necks in sand as shown in the figure below. He then blindfolds them and puts hats on each of them as shown. It is critical that only the guy in back can see two hats. The middle guy can only see the hat on the front guy. The front guy can't see anything. The bad guy takes the blindfold off and says: you each have hats on. There are either a) 2 black hats and 1 white hat or b) two white hats and 1 black hat. Without speaking to each other, if one of you can tell me what kind of hat you have on, I'll let you all live. Otherwise you die. [edit: If one of you guesses what color your hat is, but is wrong, you all die.]


How do they survive? (They do survive.)

Victoria

Pictures -- http://picasaweb.google.com/remierice/20090426VictoriaWithAnita#.
Anita probably got some better shots than me that I can post later.

Anita and I had a great time going to Victoria last weekend. We caught the Victoria Clipper at 8 am Saturday morning. The tix were $90 round trip per person. Kinda expensive, but when I calculated how much the gas cost for the 200 passengers, it's not too bad. Canadian customs decided to allow another visit by one of the notorious Meier brothers. (They harass Seth and I every time we enter Canada because of a little border-crossing incident back in 1997 when their dogs thought our vehicle smelled a little like a marijuana... well OK, that dog's marijuana detection system was probably totally overloaded and permanently damaged. Anyway, we made it in.) Hopped on a bus to get to the famous Butchart Gardens. They were indeed beautiful. But a little smaller and more manicured than I expected. And fairly crowded. But it was nice to see.

We saw one of the street performers in the harbor. These young acrobatic guys put on little shows and are usually hilarious and pretty impressive (juggling torches, etc.). Had a nice dinner and the hotel provided a pretty deluxe night's sleep. Next day, we rented a car and drove an hour to a nearby coast hike. There were some pretty spectacular trees. Especially right on the coast where they hadn't been logged. There were a couple of downed trees that happened to run down the fall line and were turned into quite useful staircases. It would've been nice to spend even more time walking, but a 5-hr hike was pretty nice. We had to hurry to get back for the 5 pm ferry back to Seattle. Talked to some interesting people on the ferry. A Swedish guy who was pretty excited about fusion energy. A couple of French girls who helped me "progresser mon francais". The boat ran into something halfway back to Seattle. Whack! Thud thud thud thud konk. She came to a halt. They pulled the log (hopefully they didn't hit a whale and pretend it was just a log) out of the water intake and we were able to keep going. Delay wasn't too bad. Overall 'twas a smooth trip to Canadia. Oh -- the report wouldn't be complete without mentioning the "Victoria Bars" that Anita baked for the trip. Wow. They are made with crumbled graham crackers with a sorta pecan-pie-ish filling... mmmmm...