New Year's Day in Whistler

Well I suppose I ought to finish this New Year's blog before January completely passes by...

We had a very low-key New Year's Eve this year - went to dinner downtown at a restaurant called Earl's (Dave's parents gave us a very generous gift card to the restaurant for Christmas!) and then walked around the city looking at holiday lights and enjoying the non-rain. We were back at home by 11:30, in time to watch Seattle's incredible midnight fireworks display on TV - which really was an impressive display, by the way.

On New Year's Day we decided to make the bound-to-happen-sometime trip to Whistler.  It's only about an hour and a half away and it was a nice sunny day - so why the heck not?

Where's Whistler? It's all happening above Washington State, for you States-siders.

Zewmed in:

This was as low-key a trip as our New Year's Eve had been the night before - we didn't have any big plans to go hiking or anything. Here are some pics from the drive there...

I finally got to see and drive over the Lion's Gate Bridge:

I tried to take pictures of the scenery along the drive, but the road between Vancouver and Whistler is super winding and my motion sickness was preventing me from doing anything but staring straight ahead at the road and trying not to vom. Here's the one cool picture I was able to snap along that road:

.  i dont know what this is a picture of  .

Arriving in Whistler...

As I said, we didn't have any particular plan for what we'd do when we arrived in Whistler Village, so we walked around to see what we could see. The town was adorable... and was not jam-packed at the time because it was early afternoon and most people in town were out on the slopes.

Here's something really cool... the gondola/ski rental/base of the trails area is right in the village. That's how entrenched the skiing lifestyle is in the town - skiers are coming down the mountain and practically just skiing right onto the sidewalk and heading to lunch. It's like instead of a Town Hall... they have a gondola.

Here are more ski things that I didn't participate in but happily observed while in Whistler:

We took a group picture for a family and in return they snapped our pic for us:

.  tourist prom pose  .

Something big happened here a few years ago. I don't remember what it was.

That's about it from Whistler! We got ourselves some lunch but eventually the town started really filling up with people as they all came off the slopes for the afternoon. It became a little too packed pretty quickly so we skeeee-daddled. A quick and lovely jaunt to Whistler!

On our way home we stopped at a pull-off to admire the mountain views alongside the road and snap some pictures:

We got mountains. Come see them! :)

I hope we head back to Whistler soon to do some hiking or snowshoeing and will certainly blog about it when we do!