By Donald H. Harrison
VICTORIA, British Columbia – Thanks to the U.S. Passenger Vessel Services Act of 1886, M.V. Star Princess made a required stop in this Canadian provincial capital, providing a brief opportunity for my wife Nancy and me to hunt down a honeymoon memory.
That 133-year-old protectionist piece of legislation banned foreign flagged vessels from transporting passengers between U.S. ports, with the idea being that such a restriction would encourage the building of U.S. flagged ships for the purpose of inter-city transportation.
However, there was a loophole in the legislation. Foreign flagged ships could take people on excursions to various American cities providing that such a cruise started and ended in the same U.S. port, and also provided that sometime during the cruise, the vessel called in a foreign port.
That’s why three-day cruises from Los Angeles to Catalina aboard foreign flagged vessels also include a stop in Ensenada, Mexico. Four-day cruises will add a stop in San Diego.
In the case of our recent Bermuda-flagged Star Princess cruise, which began and ended in Seattle, Washington, we called in the Alaskan ports of Ketchikan, Juneau, and Skagway, and then, to fulfill the foreign port requirement, we made an obligatory stop in Victoria, British Columbia, on the way back to Washington. The port call was scheduled from 7 p.m. to midnight, which afforded a couple of hours of summer daylight to look around the city.
As we already had eaten aboard Star Princess before our ship was cleared by Canadian customs, and because it was too late for any major excursions – such as a visit to the famed Butchart Gardens (which we had visited on a previous cruise) – Nancy and I decided to take in the downtown sights while trying to find the steak house where, as honeymooners, we had enjoyed chateaubriand surrounded by a medley of vegetables. We were accompanied by various members of our family, who broke off now and again to do some souvenir shopping.
Young and so obviously in love in that February of 1968, we somehow inspired the staff of what was then Hy’s Steak House to really go all out, not only serving us the most delicious meal of our lives but also providing us with the highest standard of service that we had ever experienced. It was an enchanted evening, made only better by rosy memory.
On our 25th wedding anniversary, we returned to Victoria and revisited the steak house, which since had been renamed. It still had chateaubriand on the menu, but, alas, it just wasn’t the same. Either we had grown more sophisticated over the last quarter century in our tastes, or the chateaubriand couldn’t measure up to the magical servings we had enjoyed as newlyweds.
By the time this trip rolled around, after 51 years of marriage, we had only a vague memory of where the restaurant was located, up an incline somewhere within blocks of the famed Empress Hotel. We asked various local residents if they remembered the old Hy’s Restaurant, and many didn’t. One person sent us to a different restaurant that was owned by one of Hy’s descendants. The manager of that eatery sent us to 777 Douglas Street to the Table 21 restaurant now incorporated into a Doubletree Hotel. It indeed was the site of the old Hy’s, but it no longer was a steak house. In fact, it served only breakfast.
All this, I suppose, is proof of the adage that you can never go back to the past, no matter how hard you try.
While traipsing from one eatery to another, we enjoyed the scenery of downtown Victoria, which included horse-drawn carriages, double decker buses, totem poles, beautifully planted gardens, the Parliament Building, the Empress Hotel, souvenir shops galore, a variety of statues, and a large topiary in the shape of a whale.
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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted via donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com