West Coast Christmas Report

We're back from our splurgy week at Whistler. Kyla met the three of us at the airport. The wait to get through customs was 1 1/2 hours! Yowie. It's a two hour drive to Whistler from there, so we were glad to get nestled in when we finally arrived. Dara had found us a great place, about 100 yards from the slopes and a little uphill from two major lifts to Blackcomb. The only thing we were missing was snow. It was raining when we got there, and it rained on-and-off all the next day (during which we stayed cocooned away). The next few days were gorgeous and a little below freezing. Below freezing is good. The mountains and views are really fantastic. Blackcomb and Whistler mountains are each larger than any of the resorts we've ever been to, so there was no shortage of choice in what to slide down. Still, the conditions were pretty brutal for snowboarding. It was mostly man-made granular stuff on top of a sheet of ice. As we were exploring around a bit, we heard from Dara on the walkie-talkie that she was at Horstman's Hut. She was at the top of the mountain in the warming hut drinking hot chocolate!!! Dara really earned her snowboarding credits this time. We spent three days on Blackcomb and two days on Whistler. Christmas day we woke up to find a couple of inches of snow on the ground and opted to spend the last day on Blackcomb again. The village at the bottom was wonderful -- many, many nice stores and restaurants. A great time was had by all.


The happy snowboarders. Dara is thinking, "He used to like sailing in warm places when I met him. Jeez!"


Kyla and an anonymous ninja snowboard master. Hmmm, that might be Garrett under that mask, come to think of it.


Kyla standing above the clouds. It was like this for two days, where at the base it looked like a cruddy day, but up above (this is around 6,000 feet) it was just beautiful.


No pain, no gain. Here is Kyla's knee after five days of iceboarding.


The winter wonderland on Christmas day. Finally some snow. It was depressing to be in Canada and find out they had more snow in Texas, but this cheered us all up.