So a friends (Miranda) birthday was coming up and she was going to whistler to ski with a few friends. I was kinda leaning towards not going because I had already spent so much on a season pass to Cypress and hadn't even used it yet. But I decided I would go and get a lesson and stuff.
We kinda started planning it and decided to take my car. I had been tossing up whether I needed to get winter tyres for my car for a while ago and this kicked my decision making into top gear. It seemed pretty expensive and about equal numbers of people said "yes, you need them for going up Cypress and to whistler" and "no, I don't have them and I've never had much of a problem. In the mean time I knew I needed a new left headlight bulb. The bulb in the was pretty had to get at but I managed to get him out. I went to Canadian Tire (stupid spelling) in my lunch time and debated over getting two at the same time and getting the 30% extra bright ones. Decided not to and went home. When I got home I put the bulb in and went to check them. So the side I replaced worked but now the right hand side was out! I knew that one side was usually easier to get at than the other and hoped that I had just done the tough one. My hoping didn't work at all. I undid the weather cap on the back of the unit and it fell down inside the car. Trying to get the bulb out proved impossible and it was going to be more difficult to get the new one in. I ended up having to take the radiator reservoir out to get at it. Luckily the reservoir was not to tricky to extract and I could leave all the hoses connected while I moved it out of the way. So back to Canadian Tire I went for a second bulb. Put that all in no worries but then decided to get winter tyres. It was $1000 all up and I have to pay them to store my summer tyres but I figure I only really use the car in the weekend so its not like I'm gonna wear the winter tyres out commuting. I was beginning to feel a little trapped in the city again too so now at least I will be more prepared for getting up the mountains to where I enjoy being.
Another hilarious thing I found in my car-preparing was that Canadians get ripped off when replacing their wipers. I went to get some new ones and found a whole aisle of wiper assemblies (the whole thing that clips into the arm). I had to look really hard to find just the blades (that slide into the assembly). The assembly cost $25 or something and just the blades were $6 or something. When I talked to some people at work the next day they had no idea what I was talking about! I told them that the blade is the only bit that really wears out and they don't need to buy the rest of it. They were pretty stunned!
So the weekend rolled around pretty fast. Unfortunately a mate from work had drinks at a pub for his birthday so I packed when I was drunk and only got to bed at about 12:30am on Saturday morning. Seems to be a trend forming for my Whistler trips! I woke up at 4:30am and felt really crook and got concerned that I had just spent a whole shit tonne of money on a lesson and I wasn't even going to enjoy it so I nailed a liter of water and went back to bed. When I lay down I felt even worse because I now had a liter of water in me. I curled up in the fetal position and somehow got back to sleep. Woke up at 6am and kinda felt OK. Dodged a bit of a bullet there. I went to pick up Ian, Miranda and Sy Yunn at 6:30. There were quite a few people up loading cars with skis and snowboards! The others were concerned that everything wouldn't fit in my car! I laughed as I kept piling stuff in the back. Apparently my car "looks small", which it most certainly is not. I recon we could have fit another person and their gear if I didn't have to have one of the seats down to fit the skis. I was pretty stoked to finally fill my car up with people and gear (what I bought it for) and hit the road.
When hit quite a lot of traffic when we were just getting close to Whistler and I nearly missed the start of my lesson which was a bit stressful. I was feeling OK though as a coffee at Squamish had sorted me out. The lesson was really good. The instructor told us all about the gear and I got pretty comfortable with slowing down and turning and stuff. It was a pretty expensive 5 hours though at $270! They really are creaming it! The conditions were great and they were getting better all the time. The season had a pretty slow start and every man and his dog from the lower mainland were up on the mountain. It didn't affect me too much though as I was just on the wee hills at the bottom.
On Saturday night we met up with the rest of the group and drank a lot while playing guitar / cards against humanity. There was about 12 of us I think and I only knew the three people that came in my car but it was a good group. For some reason someone thought it was a good idea to go to a bar (probably a good thing to stop making noise in the condo though) so we went to some place called Brandis. There we had a couple more and met some Aussie guys. Lots of shenanigans ensued and too much more alcohol was drunk. The bar closed at about 2am and I got to bed about 2:30. Needless to say we all kept it pretty low key on Sunday! The past couple of days were catching up with me but after some breakfast and wandering around in the snow I felt OK and we drove back to Vancouver. We did have big plans to go snow shoeing and / or tubing but that never really happened for some reason!
Cheers Guys!
When hit quite a lot of traffic when we were just getting close to Whistler and I nearly missed the start of my lesson which was a bit stressful. I was feeling OK though as a coffee at Squamish had sorted me out. The lesson was really good. The instructor told us all about the gear and I got pretty comfortable with slowing down and turning and stuff. It was a pretty expensive 5 hours though at $270! They really are creaming it! The conditions were great and they were getting better all the time. The season had a pretty slow start and every man and his dog from the lower mainland were up on the mountain. It didn't affect me too much though as I was just on the wee hills at the bottom.
On Saturday night we met up with the rest of the group and drank a lot while playing guitar / cards against humanity. There was about 12 of us I think and I only knew the three people that came in my car but it was a good group. For some reason someone thought it was a good idea to go to a bar (probably a good thing to stop making noise in the condo though) so we went to some place called Brandis. There we had a couple more and met some Aussie guys. Lots of shenanigans ensued and too much more alcohol was drunk. The bar closed at about 2am and I got to bed about 2:30. Needless to say we all kept it pretty low key on Sunday! The past couple of days were catching up with me but after some breakfast and wandering around in the snow I felt OK and we drove back to Vancouver. We did have big plans to go snow shoeing and / or tubing but that never really happened for some reason!
Cheers Guys!
No comments:
Post a Comment