A Winter's Holiday

Today is Wednesday, February 1st. Judy and I arrived in Whistler on Sunday, January 29th, with Shannon and Clint. The weather was just above freezing, and at the level of the village the precipitation was in the form of rain, heavy at times. The trees where free of snow, but we could occasionally see the hill above us blanketed in snow. We passed car after car that were heading towards Vancouver on our way up, and true to form the village was quiet and peaceful. There were people present, of course, but the hoards had departed for the City, and we had the place to ourselves.

Sunday night we visited a Greek restaurant, and three of us has the lamb, which was large and delicious. We enjoyed red wine with our dinner, which was the reason Shannon and Clint both complained of a poor night's sleep that night. I was fine, but apparently they weren't. Monday morning was the Get Up and Get 'Er Done day on the slopes, and it started out slowly with the Tremper's "walking like zombies". They bounded back pretty fast, I think, and when we met them for lunch they were both fine.

Judy and I skied together Monday morning on wide open slopes with essentially no lift line waits. We were on the Blackcomb Mountain side, and we stuck to the blue groomed slopes. They were wide open and smooth, and Judy did great. Our old skis were quite the attraction, though. As we got off the lift at the top we stopped by to talk with 2 skip patrol volunteers, women about our age or a bit older, who both commented on our skis. They encouraged us to go to the Demo Hut and get some proper skis for the day, but we decided to wait until later to try them out. Consequently we used the technology from the 1980's to ply the 2012 slopes, with seemingly good effect.

We met S&C at noon, and they commented that they had run into these same women, who recounted the tail of the couple with old skis on the hill, who didn't get Demo Skis. Keep in mind that they had no idea who S&C were with respect to us! Shannon asked if we had helmets, and they said no. In fact we were about the only ones on the mountain without them! I had no idea that this had caught on so completely. anyway, Shannon pointed out that the anachronistic couple skiing were actually her parents! We caught up with the ladies later and had a good laugh about it. we also then demoed the new style skis, and they were very nice to ride. I'm not going to concede that our older style skis were anything but fine and serviceable, They were. The new skis were certainly faster owing to the wax job they had, but our older ones also worked fine.

After lunch we all skied together for a while, and then the kids and I went further up the hill to the 7th Heaven lift, which goes above tree line. We took these long and wonderful runs a couple of times, and then decided to rejoin Judy and think about heading down. Juruf was quite tired at this point, and she opted to take the lift down. We skied next to the lift, and paced her most of the way to the midpoint of the mountain, where she needed to transfer to another lift to the bottom. Just before we got to that point we hit the fog bank, and the temperature jumped above freezing. The snow was wet and heavy, the visibility was nil, and we decided to take the lift ourselves. As we neared the bottom we saw Judy just ahead of us, still on her skis, heading to the Aspens Resort where we were staying. We all made it there at the same time, and headed to the hot tub for some needed relaxation.

We had a great time, and getting back on skis was fun for me. I am not in the shape I need to be in for this sort of activity, however. I need much more leg exercising, and I need to get my legs into shape. Back to the bicycle!