Pre-Christmas Trip to Whistler + Christmas Day Feasting!

Since flying back to Massachusetts from Vancouver is so insanely expensive around the holidays, Dave and I have stayed around BC for Christmas the last two years. It is, of course, not ideal for us to be away from our families for the holidays, but we have definitely made the best of it!

Last year we took an awesome (but at times terrifying) trip to Banff, Alberta for the weekend leading up to Christmas, which you can (and definitely should) read about here: Part 1 / Part 2 / Part 3. Tons of amazing pictures of mountains and blue skies and mountains and sleigh rides and mountains. Go look.

This year we splurged on a hotel room in Whistler, BC for the night of December 23rd, and turned the entire trip into a hiking/snowshoeing/hot-chocolate drinking/lights-seeing/eating extravaganza!

On Monday, Dec. 23 we headed north of Vancouver towards Whistler, stopping along the way in Garibaldi Provincial Park to go hiking along the Diamond Head Trail to the Red Heather Hut.

.  vancouver to whistler, with a hike in squamish along the way!  .

.  our hike to the red heather warming hut  .

The road to the trailhead requires snow tires or chains this time of year. We drove up Garibaldi Park Road until we couldn't anymore, then we parked and continued up the road on foot about 2km till we reached the Diamond Head Trail parking lot. That's when our park road ended and a woodsy trail began. There wasn't much snow at first - we began with icy rocks and grass, which eventually turned into slushy snow...

Then slightly less slushy snow...

.... until finally we were high enough that we were walking over real snow, and we donned our snowshoes for the remainder of the ascent.

I loved being surrounded by the fog and snow in the quiet forest. Every once in awhile I could catch a waft of the pine trees, which really made it all quite Christmasy. Check out the furry trees, with moss dripping off of their bark:

After hiking for a couple of hours or so, we took a steep shortcut off of the main trail and made our way through Red Heather Meadow to get to Red Heather Hut - a warming hut with a wood stove and two large picnic benches inside.

.  view of red heather meadow, from inside of the warming hut  .

This was an amazing place to rest, warm up, and enjoy our lunch of Subway sandwiches, kettle cooked chips, peppermint tea and a Mars bar while our boots dried off by the stove. We rested for about 25 minutes before strapping on our boots again and making our way back down the mountain.

After our morning/afternoon of hiking we got back into the car and continued north to Whistler Village, stopping briefly in Squamish for a quick fast food fix ... where we had a beautiful, full rainbow overhead...

Arriving in Whistler, we checked into our hotel for the evening - Summit Lodge & Spa right in the Village. I was immediately pleased with our decision to stay there. They had gorgeous Christmas decorations in the lobby and a friendly front desk employee, who complimented my Christmasy nails (and thus won me over instantly). The hotel also had a heated outdoor pool and hot tub which we wasted little time in getting into...

.  so steamy  .

I'm not usually one to enjoy hot tubs - they're so hot - but the chill in the air made it incredibly relaxing to be sitting in a steaming tub of water while surrounded by wintery mountains and snow.

Our room at the Lodge even had a charming fake fireplace, a balcony with a mountain view, a very reasonably-priced snack basket, and big comfy white bath robes for us! We did our fair share of regally lounging in our robes inside of our hotel room, obvi.

On Monday night we strolled through the Village and were pleasantly surprised by the abundance of Christmas lights all over the place. The Olympic Plaza in particular was very festive. The plaza has a big ice skating rink (complete with huge disco ball) and is entirely surrounded by trees with Christmas lights. You can see a little picture of it here... Not sure why I didn't take any pictures of it myself. Possibly I was too chilly to take my hands out of my jacket.

We went to dinner at Black's Restaurant & Pub, where I mowed down on a Caesar salad topped with garlic prawns, while Dave started with a beet salad and had a rack of bison ribs (!) for dinner. The food was yummy, but the restaurant was a bit crowded. I don't mean it was packed with people; I mean that the tables were all really crowded together and it was hard for everyone (waitstaff included) to maneuver between them. Just something to note, if you're looking for a more spacious atmosphere for your Whistler dinner.

After dinner we walked around a bit more before deciding to go back to the hotel to put on additional layers (it was chilly!) and then heading out again for more walking and some hot chocolate. We sipped our hot chocolates beside the Olympic Plaza's outdoor fireplace and Dave played around a bit on the deserted skating rink before we called it a night.

The next day we started our morning at Dubh Linn Gate Irish Pub - for breakfast, not beers. I had their breakfast wrap (which was just the right size for me), and Dave had their Blackcomb Breakfast (which might have been a bit small for him). Each of our meals came with an Irish potato cake, which was like a little patty of hashbrowns. It was good!

We had big plans to go snow-tubing at Whistler Blackcomb's Coca Cola Tube Park that afternoon - an activity I was suuuuuper excited about. My parents' house in Massachusetts has a sizable, multi-tiered hill in its backyard. In short, my house was THE house for the neighborhood kids to go for snow tubing, back in the day. We could spend hours out there - gleefully shooting down the hill and then trudging back up it on foot over and over again, only heading inside for short hot chocolate breaks. So when I found out there was a snow tubing park at Whistler, you can bet your sweet ass that it went straight to the top of my list of things I needed to do.

After breakfast at the Irish pub, we took the gondola ride from the Village up to the tubing park, soaring over trees and condos as we ascended the mountain. After disembarking from the gondola, there was still a series of stairs to climb before reaching the tube park. MY EXCITEMENT WAS CLIMBING. LITERALLY.

CAN YOU TELL I'M BUILDING UP TO SOMETHING?

Ugh. Guys. The conditions on the mountain that morning were too slick for adults to use the tubing park that day. Apparently the weight of an adult would make the tubing tracks too long on the icy snow, so... no tubing for me and Dave, unfortunately. It really was a huge disappointment for me, personally, since I don't ski or snowboard... tubing was the activity for me at Whistler. Mreh!

Since we couldn't go tubing, we enjoyed our ride back down the mountain in the gondola and then opted to walk around some of Whistler Village's many random trails through the woods.

.  view of skiers on the mountain  .

After walking around for a bit, it was time to climb into the car and head back south towards Vancouver. We wanted to hit up the Eagle Run in Brackendale before nighttime, to see if there were more eagles to see than there were the last time we were there. There were definitely more this time! Here are some pics of the scenery and eagles there:

By then we were pretty ready to head back to our little apartment in Vancouver, where Dave finished wrapping his presents and then we settled in for a little Christmas Eve Fred Claus action.

On Christmas morning I woke up early to FaceTime with my family on the east coast. Through the wonders of technology, I was able to watch them open up all the presents that we'd sent them. Next we Skyped with Dave's family and got to see them open up all of their presents as well. #AyoTechnology.

After all of that family time, Dave and I opened our own presents together. We got each other (and ourselves) all sorts of little goodies. We like to get ourselves small gifts that we can both use in our apartment - it's fun to wrap them all up and then unwrap them again, even if we know what they all are. It's just fun to unwrap presents, isn't it? :) There were still a few little surprises in there though, don't worry.

Dave then proceeded to work his cooking magic - making us a full breakfast of eggs and bacon. Once we had a good breakfast in our systems, we took a mid-day walk along the Seaside Bike Path, with a little detour into a maritime museum where we looked around at different sailboats and I took some blue-inspired pictures:

.  yes, this is the angle i meant to take  .
.  #art  .

Then it was time to head back home because Dave had big plans of making us a roast beef dinner - you know the kind that takes all day to prepare. No complaints about that from me!

.  this was my view for the next several hours  .

He spent the rest of the afternoon preparing roast beef, roasted potatoes, peas/carrots, bacon-wrapped sausage, gravy, and he even invented a new spin on Yorkshire pudding...

.  the roast beef!  .

.  bacon wrapped sausages, for the win  .

.  the yummy, onion filled gravy  .

.  this is how you make a yorkshire pudding when you don't have a cupcake pan  .

.  slices of yorkshire pudding!  .

Of course he finished up the amazing dinner by making us stove-top hot chocolate for dessert. He sure knows how to feed a girl! He treated me to a similar day of feasting last Christmas, too :)

All in all, our holiday - pre-Christmas and Christmas - was really a lovely one. We got to do some hiking/snowshoeing, enjoyed a special evening in a really nice hotel in a winter wonderland, ate some delicious food, participated remotely in our families' present-opening, and had a full day of Christmas feasting.

I'm happy that Dave and I have been creating special holiday memories while we've been out here in Vancouver... and hope that you were able to do the same, wherever you are in the world!

Oh and... Happy New Year!!!

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Tough Mudder at the Whistler Olympic Park

Tough Mudder came to Whistler, BC this past weekend (June 22-23), with both Dave and his visiting brother, Robert, participating in the challenge on Sunday.

The guys have been signed up for this for months, and Rob flew all the way from Tampa, FL to participate in what was his third Tough Mudder. 

If you're not familiar with Tough Mudder, it's a challenging military-style obstacle course that's broken up by running. The Mudders held at Whistler were on a 12-mile course at the Whistler Olympic Park and were comprised of 20 separate obstacles. The obstacles are pretty bonkers - they ranged from swimming through a dumpster full of ice, to jumping over fire, to climbing up and over walls, to getting zapped with electricity. The price of participating in the event as an athlete can range anywhere from about $100 to $180, depending upon when you sign up. Definitely a chunk of change. Also worth bitching about noting is that the cost of being a SPECTATOR is $20 in advance or $40 the day of. This I do not support. 

The Saturday Mudder was pretty overcast, as I understand, but Sunday ended up being quite sunny so there was plenty of sweat to go along with all of the mud. The boys got their registration packets and their race numbers to pin onto their shirts, in addition to getting their race numbers scrawled onto their foreheads with black marker:

.  she had some trouble with dave's forehead so she ended up marking up his arms instead  .

The guys made their way to the start line with the other athletes in their 10:20AM heat, and I set off with the other spectators.  Spectators were relegated to 3 different marked routes throughout the day, and each route allowed us to view particular obstacles. For example, the Green Spectator Route might take you to obstacles 2, 3 and 15, while the Purple Spectator Route might allow you to see obstacles 17-18. 

Thus, spectators could only actually see about 5 or 6 of the 20 total obstacles. This was done I suppose mostly for timing purposes: If spectators were to try watching every single obstacle, they couldn't make it to the next obstacle in time to see their athlete (who is running to the next obstacle) complete it. While our spectator routes were helpful bee-lines between some of the obstacles, they were completely out in the open to the sun - no shade whatsoever. Certainly not in the woods, as the course maps would lead you to believe.

At the second obstacle, where the athletes were to swim across a dumpster full of ice cubes, Rob dislocated his shoulder while pulling himself out of the dumpster. Luckily there was a medical tent quite nearby, but the poor guy had to wait in excruciating pain for several minutes before getting his arm rammed back into its socket by a doctor. Eesh. He was unable to complete many of the obstacles thereafter because he was wearing a sling and was unable to lift his arm over his head, but he was a trooper and ran along the whole rest of the way with David and completed what he could. 

Dave did really well at the obstacles that I could see, though he swears he thought he was going to die in the ice dumpster. Here he is in red shirt in the foreground, immediately after he'd come out of the dumpster. His brother is in the red shirt on top of the dumpster - he has literally JUST dislocated his shoulder in this pic:

In addition to the ice dumpster, I also saw David jump off a plank into a water pit 15 feet below in one obstacle, and make his way up a huge quarter pipe like it tweren't no thang in another obstacle. Here's a short video compilation of those three events (you can see Dave in the red shirt in the 2nd and 3rd clips):

And I watched him "slip 'n slide" through a bunch of dangling electric zappers:

And dominate some crazy monkey bars (the picture I took of this obstacle was awful but you can see the Funky Monkey obstacle here). 

He also climbed up and over a bunch of these walls with little fanfare:

Here are some other non-David shots of the course:

.  olympic ski jumps  .
.  tough mudders are tiny runners in the upper right  .

To conclude it all, they had to run through a chute of long, dangling wires that were zapping them with electricity. People did notttt seem to enjoy this part:

.  you can't see it, but he is gritting his teeth quite hard here  .

Overall it looked like a pretty exhilarating thing to participate in - everyone there was simultaneously psyched and devastated. Also, muddy. I was so proud of David for how strong 'n tough he is. I wish I'd been able to see all 20 of his obstacles!

And what a freaking day for it all. My goodness. Here's one of my favorite pics from the day - and yesss I have adjusted the exposure and saturation just for the fun of it:

The downside of the day was that I was pretty much dying in the sun all day long. We were out there for about 5 hours - the athletes needed to arrive an hour before their race time, and then the course itself takes them anywhere from 3-4.5 hours to complete.

For the $40 I was charged just to watch the race, I apparently couldn't afford a spot of shade anywhere. No tents for spectators at all. The one place along the entire course that provided any shade - more accurately, the ONLY shade - was at Obstacle 11, a part of the course which happened to go past the enormous tent that had been used earlier in the day for the athletes' registration process. This tent was huge enough to fit a very large wedding beneath it. Aside from about 15 feet of its length that was being used as a "bag drop" area for athletes, the rest of the massive tent was empty. Empty. 

.  effing empty  .

I was kicked out of this tent and told that no one was allowed in there. No amount of my very rational and calm pleading with the race volunteer about the size of the massive empty tent and the lack of shade anywhere else on the entire spectator route made a difference. She simply kept repeating that no one was allowed there. I wanted to just die. On her. And make her deal with my rotting, sun-beaten corpse. Oy.

But other than the heat and overexposure problem, the day could not have been more beautiful. I am willing to bet that the Whistler Tough Mudder course had some of the most stunning scenery of all the Mudders this year.

.  sexy sons of bitches  .

Whistler Olympic Park is certainly lovely in the sunny summertime. I'm sure it's even better in the snow, with all the mountains surrounding it and the bright green trees.

Have you ever done a Tough Mudder or been a spectator at one? If so, I'd love to know what you thought of the whole thing!

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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!