Well Vancouver is certainly nuts about Ice Hockey! Myself, Tom and Nathan headed down to the pub last Monday to watch Game 7 of the first playoff series against Dallas. Vancouver won, putting them through to the next round against Anaheim and the whole town went crazy. Here’s a video I took on my phone (1.3MB) while walking home that night.

The Sun Run, a 10K fun run and Vancouver’s largest annual running race with 53,000 participants this year, kicked off at 9am just up the road from our apartment block. The fitness centre across the road thought it would be a great promotional tool to set up an aerobics class out on the street… complete with pumping tunes and instructor with microphone: “when your heart rate rises, your life goes wheee!”, “Vancouver, you make us proud”, and my favourite “when you say hello to us, you’re saying that you have energy, you have strength!”. They decided to start this around 7.30am, an hour and a half in advance of the race! Wankers!

Since I’d been woken up anyway, I got up and myself and Anna went out to shoot some photos.

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The playoffs started last night, with the Canucks hosting Dallas here in Vancouver. No I know bugger all about the game, but watched a bit of it anyway. The game consistes of 3 * 20min periods, and it finished at 4-4 after regular time, so they go to golden goal…

80, yes EIGHTY, minutes later, the Canucks score to win the game! The golden goal period was 33% longer than the regular time game.

After two weeks of looking, we found a nice apartment in Coal Harbour, which was fully furnished, and didn’t want a one year lease. All bills, including cable TV, high speed internet and apparently limitless downloads are taken care of too! Sweet. The place also has view over to the mountains on the North Shore which gives me something to look at while farting around on my laptop, though since this is my first time living in a high rise I have to remember that there’s probably another 400 apartments who can look in my windows.

Our complex also has a small gym on the third floor, so I’ve been heading down there most morning’s this week just getting back into exercise. Clearly snowboarding in minus temperatures doesn’t require a whole lot of energy, as my gut managed to expand over winter. Then again, it could have been the jellies. On the plus side, my legs seem to be in pretty good shape which is beneficial from a running point of view.

Now it’s time to look for a job and start earning some cash again!

Finally, after 7 days of continuous rain, the sun came out and Vancouver turned on its charms. Myself and Tom made the most of the opportunity and went for a walk around Stanley Park to see the sights and take a few photos.

We came across a pair of swans building a nest, which was a good excuse for me to take out my new Canon EF 70-200 lens and get some close-up shots. I got a great one of a Mallard drake. It’s so sharp, and so crystal clear I find it hard to believe I took it myself ;-)

After strolling around for a bit longer than originally planned, we met up with Lisa’s friend Carole for a few beers. She’d given us valuable help over e-mail before we arrived, and yesterday she gave us the lowdown on Vancouver life and answered all our questions.

There’s a couple of thing I’d noticed about Vancouver:

First, I’ve yet to see an estate agent’s. They’re everywhere in Sydney and in Dublin. Do Vancouverites not sell their houses, or maybe they’ve got some alternative, as-yet-unheard-of way of transacting real estate business?

Second, there are a lot of homeless and mentally disturbed people wandering the streets, more so than Dublin or Sydney. In Stanly Park yesterday we came across a woman standing on the beach shouting abuse at the ocean.

Finally, like Sydney, there’s lots of great, cheap ethnic food. We’ve had something different each night and have yet to have a crap meal. That augurs well!

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First impressions? Will it ever stop fucking raining! It’s rained almost non-stop since we got here, and is forecast to continue until Sunday. I commented to Tom today that this is the most rain I’ve seen in 8 years. I might as well have moved back to Dublin ;-)

While in Whistler, Jonny showed us this monster jump which was built specifically for filming two skiers on. It may not look that huge until you notice the two people standing on the lip of the landing. He reckons they’d need to run in to it at 90km/h to ensure they bridge the ‘detah gap’ as we called the cutout. Unfortunately I didn’t see the skiers jump it as clear skies were too intermittent and I was usually riding at the other side of the mountain when the conditions suddenly became good enough to film. By the time I’d get back over, they’d be crap again and filing would be wound up for the day.

The snowboard tour is over. We’re leaving Whistler tomorrow, driving down to Vancouver to look for a house and job. Back to the real world.

I’ve had a mixed week here in Whistler. It’s been great to catch up with Bevin & Jonny again, but the snow has been a bit sketchy. It had rained heavily before I arrived, and all during my first day, which destroyed the snow quality on the mountain. The temperature then dropped rapidly, freezing the hill into an ice rink.

I wasn’t too fussed about going riding in crap snow, and didn’t hold much hope of getting too much boarding done during the week, but then, thankfully, it started snowing. I did a half day on Tuesday which was OK, but there wasn’t much cover over that ice layer, and with detuned edges on my board I was all over the place.

Wednesday was brilliant as we’d had 30cm of powder in the last 24 hours. We made a couple of loops through the Blackcomb Glacier bowl, finding fresh tracks in knee-deep light powder. I’d also got my board tuned, so my edges were holding on the groomers too. Thursday was awesome too, with myself and Bevin spending all day in the Symphony Bowl.

We awoke on Friday morning bright and early, to 10cm of fresh outside the window and it was still snowing. Myself and Bevin were raring to go and were on the Creekside Gondola by 8.30. Jonny was telling us that there was an inversion and it was raining up top, but we didn’t believe him, figuring he was just jealous because he had to work and couldn’t enjoy the powder. Unfortunately he was right, and while there was lots of new snow, it was really wet, heavy stuff which was really hard to ride in. Plus, it was still raining. We rode around for a couple of hours, but by 11.30 we were through, calling it a day and heading down to meet Tom for coffee.

Still, 53 days riding, usually in great snow, is a huge season for me. My days as a snow bum are over though, unless Project Lotto comes good. Meanwhile it’s back to sitting in front of a computer.

Well, we’ve now made it to the last stop on the snowboard tour. We left Fernie on Saturday and drove first to Revelstoke via Rogers Pass. Rogers Pass is one of the most economically important passes in Canada, as both the Trans-Canada Highway and the railway line pass through it, connecting Vancouver to the rest of the country.

The scenery is amazing, with steep, high mountains, laden with snow on all sides, but this comes at a price. Rogers Pass is prone to massive avalanches and there are approximately 140 slide paths which threaten the highway. Snow sheds have been built in the worst places to protect traffic, and quite a few that we drove through had had avalanches roll over them.

After a quick stop in Revelstoke itself, Tom decided we should continue on to Kamloops, getting more of the drive out of the way on the first day and leaving us only 300km remaining to Whistler itself. That turned out to be a good decision, as the latter part of the journey say us driving on a secondary road which wound its way down an avalanche-prone valley. However, with spring bringing plenty of rain, it was falling/fallen rocks we had to worry about and not snow. We managed to beach our rental car on one rock, having overestimated how much clearance we had, but were able to free ourselves with some judicious back and forth driving. For the next 90km we were confronted with fresh rockfalls around what seemed like every second corner and to make matters worse, it had been raining all day which didn’t bode well for the snow at Whistler.

We’re now crashing on Bevin’s couch for the week before heading to Vancouver next Monday.

Carrying my SLR around on the ski hill plays havoc with my snowboarding as the last thing I want to do is fall over and land on it, so I usually didn’t bother bringing it up the hill. Tom took plenty of photos with his IXUS, so I grabbed a few of them and stuck them up here.

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