Adventures

We actually got up and moving fairly close to our planned start time. We did not how ever get on the slopes by 9am. It was closer to 10:30, but not bad, considering.

Luke and Tye went snowshoeing while Tawn, Dan, Reed and I headed up Whistler to go snowboarding. I’ll spare the details of the snowboarding, which was awesome, and other than Tawn breaking one of her bindings we had a really good day. Tawn spent a hour or so getting her binding fixed and was back on the mountain. Of course Whistler is so friggin huge that we never saw her again till the end of the day. She took a fall and jammed her elbow pretty good. Nothing a little booze won’t fix right up.

We all met at The Longhorn for a little apres` skiing and to fuel up, since we failed to eat anything for lunch (too much fun snowboarding) and breakfast consisted of a some soggy scrabbled eggs and toast from the Marriot’s complimentary b-fast. After dining on some fryables (as Tawn calls bar food) and downing a few cold ones. We decided to head back to the condo for showers and a little pre-func to decide where or what we wanted to do for the night. It was New Years Eve after all.

I should at this point mention that a friend of a friend of Dan’s showed up with a friend of his…This guy was odd, funny but odd. He did not drink (never trust a man that does not drink) and did not wish to go out for the night. While we are all socializing he sat at the dinning room table, listening to his iPod and writing in his journal….oh and at one point got up and started playing what is best described as “Air Tennis” while watching Canadian MTV (sober).

After wandering about Whistler Village we and finding that New Years Eve in Whistler was turning out to be very expensive ($150-$500 cover charges) which we were not about ready to pay….well, most of us were not. Dan’s friend of a friend did….hehe. Just as we were about to give up all hope, Tawn comes running around the corner with information of a mythical place that only charged $40 and that included champagne (yuck!) and appetizers (yum!). Hooray for Tawn’s cheapness!! :)

Lead us to the motherland Tawn! The journey to this magical place began as all journeys of this type do, with a single step and ended about 32 steps later right around the corner at the next bar. Sorry, but that is really all there was to it. And the bar and celebrations were about as run of the mill and anti-climatic as any other New Years Eve. But good times and free appetizers were had by all.
And with the exception of Kevin (Dan’s friend of a Friend) stumbling into the condo, cussing like a sailor with turets, bumping into and stepping on just about everything in the condo, the rest of the night was fairly uneventful.

The big weekend is here, and after playing bumper jeeps all the way to the Canadian border we arrived in Vancover, B.C. and checked in to our hotel room. My stupid new phone broke, while unloading stuff in the hotel parking garage, but that did’nt really matter since five of the nine or ten most likely people I would want to talk to on a weekend were staying in the same hotel/condo with me for the next four days.

After checking in and waiting for Luke and Tye to get settled in we went out to explore downtown Vancouver. Nothing too spectacular, we had a nice, albeit expensive Italian dinner. After dinner we went in search of booze (of course), on our way we picked up our very our human theme song. Taking the form of a Vancouver street urchin, this merry soul wandered up to us singing a song I’m titling “I got a whooooole lot a BC”. Obviously looking for a hand out, he strolled along with us for a good 15 minutes through the streets of Vancouver, singing at the top of his lungs and strumming his guitar. Pegging us as tourist, he would sing portions of his song in French. The reason for this was due to the fact that when he asked us from where we hailed, I lied and told him Quebec. It was actually funny as hell. Here we were walking around town, 6 of us plus our little buddy, all of us singing along to the “BC” song. People were looking at us like we were part of some sort of…..i’m not sure really. Maybe they just thought we were drunk tourist.

Anyway, after finding a suitable bar and only having one drink, we decided to head a back to the hotel. This was a very early night for us, but we all wanted to be able to get up early and drive the rest of the way to Whislter in the morning and get on the slopes by 9am.

But first, a pit stop. Dan’s brother had heard about a particular bar in town with a very special Juke box. The bar was called “The Cambie” and he wanted to check it out, the Juke box in particular. So off we went. We found the place with very little difficulty and once inside we spotted the Jukebox. From my vantage point there we nothing really special about this Jukebox, but Reed just had to take a closer look. We indulged him and I grabbed an ice cold Moosehead, which I regretted almost immediately.

After inspecting the Jukebox for a few minutes, he came back across the bar and we headed back to our hotel for the night. That Reed REALLY likes JukeBoxes! Odd.

Goodnight Vancouver!!