Go to Canada!

Ok. So, Canada. We all flew into Seattle and then drove up to Whistler the next day. But now I'm ahead of myself, because what makes you think "greatest vacation ever" more than having to diffuse a bar fight with hick Washington locals within the first 4 hours of the trip. I wish I had pictures of these guys but it was the most ridiculous situation I'd been involved in, probably ever.

Matt...


lives down the street from a townie bar. And we had sometime to kill before Drew...



landed at 1130. When I say townie bar I mean pretty much what you're picturing. Small, dirty, broken door on the men's bathroom, one bartender/waitress/manager. So when we get there a pair of Indian guys are playing pool. We do the proper thing and put down quarters, asking to have next round, they're fine with that. So we're taking turns using the table and then new people arrive and want to play against us. By this point Matt and Tony have left for the airport, leaving me, Jason, Steve and Matt's friend whose name I unfortunately can't remember.... Mike? maybe... let's just call him Mike to make this easier.

So Mike and Jason...



play this new pair of people and win, keeping the table. Then more people start challenging them. Steve and I are just sitting back drinking, laughing, having a good time, when Steve notices one of the "losers" giving Mike dirty looks. Now I've maybe had a few drinks. Steve has maybe had a few pitchers. You know, good times :D But we start joking about how Jason should run up, sucker punch the one redneck guy and then we all run away. This must have been over heard by the Indian guys (who kept disappearing into the bathroom to smoke weed we late figured out) because next thing I know they're talking to the hick guys and we're all getting even more dirty looks. So by this point Steve and Jason think a bar fight is the greatest idea ever, Mike is fairly indifferent but would go along and I don't want anything to do with actual violence.

Mike finally suggests taking a break from playing and he and Jason give up the table by either intentionally losing or just bad luck, I'm still not sure which and the fight is avoided. Of course five minutes later Matt, Tony and Drew arrive and are mad they missed the fun and have to talked out of rekindling the animosity.

Whew. So that was night one.

Day One: Road trip to Whistler



Whistler is about a 5 hour drive from Seattle. So we piled all our stuff in to the Expedition we were borrowing from Steve and off we went. Tony and Drew slept, I rode middle in back so as to have a kick ass footrest :D



Woohoo the border!



It turns out the border patrol people have no interest in being anything but deathly serious with you. We stopped to run around anyway.



There were shenanigans.





Did you ever see that South Park Episode where they went to Canada to get Ike back and ended up finding Saddam Hussien? And on the way when they asked directions they were told "follow they only road"? That's how we felt. I turns out there is only one main road that runs from the border, through Vancouver and on up to Whistler. And when I say through Vancouver I mean it was like driving down the strip in Coralville. For almost two hours. Talk about good times.

But it did get us right to our condo (after a few wrong turns) and it was completely worth it. There was a ton of snow on the ground and we had a huge hill in our backyard so of course we did the only sensible thing: built a sled run!



Well first I guess we had a bit of a snowball fight. I ran up the hill and started raining snowballs down on everyone as they came out the back door. The snow at the very top was a bit britttle so I had a weight advantage being the smallest, it was easiest for me to get all the way to the top.





Matt tried the sled run head first



I wasn't so brave (foolish?)

I seem to have a bad habit of building sled runs that end in dangerous places. I'm thinking back to the one behind Daum which ended at concrete steps and there was that tree to avoid along the way. And then last year in Mammoth it ended in the road...



Well this year you had to brake before slamming into the side of the hot tub. :D

So there's the first 36 hours. I forget how time consuming it is to add all the photos so I'm going to break it up into lots of shorter posts.