27th August 2008

Well it's the night before I move on campus into my new home for the next few months and I'm celebrating my sitting out in Jan Louise's garden with a glass of wine, enjoying what I'm sure will be very rare fine weather for the rest of my time in Vancouver! We had a great time over on Vancouver Island visiting the Butchart Gardens, which are over 100 years old and really quite amazingly beautiful (and I'm not even a garden person! Hehe). We got our first taste of real Vancouver weather while we were there though and it bucketed down with rain, so I left Mum and Jan Louise to it and headed back into Victoria to catch up with one of my Contiki friends, Christina.

Both still feeling like we needed some recovery time after Contiki, we decided to take it easy and spent the night in at the hotel ordering room service. She's from New Zealand and is planning to do some travel in Aus some time in the next few years so hopefully we'll get to catch up at some point and do some travel on the west coast. It's amazing how many people I've spoken to who have actually managed to make the trek across to the western side of Australia and talk about how beautiful it is all along the coast. And here I've barely been farther South than Dunsborough or past Joondalup up north haha So I've put on my travel itinery for the future to do a bit of travel through WA, considering it's right on my doorstep!

After we got back from Vancouver Island I spent a couple of days getting myself ready for college (getting myself ready for college!!! How cool does that sound??? Haha) Took a trip to Sears for bed linen and a comforter, filched a bunch of crockery and cutlery off Jan Louise, and bought mundane things like washing liquid that somehow seem infinitely more exciting because I'm buying them to use at a university college!!

We'd made plans that weekend to go back to Whistler, but the night before we left was pretty hilarious because Jan Louise's oven was being temperamental so our roast chicken took several more hours to cook than we'd first predicted and we ended up going through a few bottles of wine before we got dinner on the table, which resulted in much hilarious conversation, advice about men (which I may choose on this occasion to ignore…), and ridiculous "drunk dialing" by Jan Louise to our answering machine back home (sorry Dad! Haha). But she paid for her sins the next morning on the bus ride up, during which I opted not to sit next to her…

So there we were, back in what I have recently decided is one of my favourite places on earth! With just a few hours to spare before we went zip trekking, which Jan Louise had been kind enough to book on our behalf without our knowing hehe Mum's not a big fan of heights so she was pretty reserved about the whole idea, but it had been one of the few optional extras that I hadn't done on my Contiki tour that I later really wished I'd done so I was stoked to have the opportunity. And we had a ball! It's crazy good fun! They basically hook you up to a wire that's high up in the trees (as high as 220 feet ie. 68 metres) and push you off and you zoom along in a harness. We did 5 of them, the longest of which was about 700 metres. And once we'd done the first one and I was reassured that I wouldn't plummet to my death, I was absolutely loving it =D Specially the last run where a different breaking system was used that allowed you to swing yourself upside down, let go, and dangle upside down! Seriously good fun…that afternoon when we got back we hopped on the Gondola and headed up the mountain for the mountain top BBQ, which they put on every Friday and Saturday night, including live music. We got really lucky with the weather and were able to sit outside until the sun went down - it got pretty chilly pretty fast after that!

That evening I lamented over the fact that I was in one of the places on earth with the very best night life, but I didn't have anyone to go out with! Jan Louise would perhaps have hit the town with me on another occasion had she not gone so hard the night before haha but both her and Mum were looking about ready to turn in by the time we got back down the mountain. But they decided that I could absolutely not sit around with them and be an "old lady" so they were kind enough to come and sit with me (chaperone you might say haha) in the hotel bar for a couple of drinks, before Jan Louise went the extra mile and basically made some friends for me!! Haha she told the barman I was looking to go out that night and asked where might be a good place to go, and he very kindly recommended a number of places before inviting me to join him and his mates for a drink because he was finishing up work and moving out of Whistler the following week. So off I went with my fabulous new friends and ended up having a fine old time!

The next day I went into the village with Mum for ye olde faithful brunch favourite, Egg's Florentine =D No better way to start a Sunday! Still got nothing on C15 though, man I'm missing that place…After that we took a wander through the village and I became seriously obsessed with the idea of moving here. I went to one of the information desks and asked about season passes and spoke to a girl who had just moved here about how I might get accommodation, then picked up the local paper and started scouring the classified section haha seriously though, it's the kind of place you just fall in love with. I've heard from so many people now that they came up for the weekend, and then they're still here five years later, and I can totally understand how that would happen! Plus it seems to be some sort of Aussie right of passage to work at Whistler haha so perhaps I really should do it…anyway, big decisions to be made in the next few weeks!

LIVxo