Whistler Village
Originally uploaded by jonketo.

Just before Thanksgiving Allen Tam (not this Allen Tam) organized a trip to Vancouver. My brother, Sandra and I decided to go hang out in Vancouver since it had been a while. It was also a great excuse to eat some dim sum and gorge ourselves on grilled meat at Shabusen (which we did very effectively).

Before we left I was thinking about the ski season and getting my car ready for the moutains. A PM at work has the same car as I do, so he was able to give me recommendations for high performance tractions tires. I ended up getting the same tires he did, PZero Nero M&S. They are super tires. I will tell you soon why I am confident they were a good choice. With new tires, an oil change, a Yakima snowboard rack(thanks Byron!) and an itch to put my Thanksgiving weekend to good use I convinced Eric and Sandra to go snowboarding in Whistler since we were going to be in Vancouver anyways.

Vancouver was fun, the dim sum was good. Shabusen was filling. I learned that Vancouver bus drivers don’t care and will merge into the road forcing traffic into oncoming lanes of traffic. I guess I am used to the passiveness of metro drivers. Saw a guy on the road driving a beast of a car. We chatted between cars. I revved my engine as I started and he did the same. We could still hear his car three blocks down the road.

After dinner we were finally off to Whistler. The drive up the Sea to Sky highway through Squamish was pleasant. The roads were free of traffic and the Canadian police had a roadblock to stop drunk drivers. I was really glad they were being responsible in terms of drunk drivers. It made me feel self. We check into our our hotel and crashed, so we could get to snowboarding the next day. After breakfast at Element Urban Tapas Restraurant we hit the slopes. We boarded on Whistler Mt. … for no particular reason. We spent most of the time helping teach Sandra how to snowboard, but we definitely saw improvement, so it was worth it. Eric and I had time to bomb down one run at the end of the day, so we were happy. We were all jazzed about the rest of the season. My goal of the trip was to get people pumped about snowboarding this season and I was happy to see it happen.

After all the fun and games it was time for us to drive home on Sunday. It was 10:00 am and were sitting around after breakfast. We were all a little sore and tired, so we decided to skip a couple hours of boarding and head home early. We had plenty of time ….. NOT!. Fortunately we decided to head home in a big snow storm. We took it slow. Fortunately my car has all wheel drive, so we made it up and down the big hill at the Vancouver truck crossing. In our defense, we didn’t hit the blizzard until that hill, so we didn’t know how bad it was going to be. The drive back ended up taking 9-10 hours, but we got some entertainment from cars passing us and then spinning out into the ditch.

That was my excitement for the last few weeks. I climbed a v6 in the gym yesterday. Will probably go snowboarding this weekend. And work is cool too.