Aug 2008

The end of July saw Bec's 30th birthday fly under the radar, as she had hoped, with breakfast in bed, a bunch of wild flowers and a nice dinner. Bec thanks everyone who sent birthday wishes and gifts. She was particularly chuffed with the creative genius behind the 'pictures booklet' and how her brother always knows exactly what to buy.

The following weekend saw the Canadian National BBQ Championships held in Whistler. Glenn quite fancied his chances in the 'local chef' category but, alas, couldn't get the time off work to showcase his BBQ-ing talents. $5 bought us a toothpick and a small cup and we stuffed ourselves with BBQ'd pork, chicken, beef and ribs. As with everything in Whistler, there were some very hard-core BBQ set-ups. Glenn has committed a few ideas to memory so we can 'modify' our own BBQ when we get home.

Canadian BBQ Championships

Glenn went to Whistler's first annual Cheese Rolling Festival two weekends ago and reports that it was more similar to the Goomeri Pumpkin Rolling than it was to the Stilton Cheese Rolling in that they actually rolled real product as opposed to blocks of wood. The action was pretty fast and furious and one has to feel sorry for the poor guys employed to stop people crashing into the hay barrier at the bottom.

Crash control at Cheese Rolling

The biggest highlight for us recently has been volunteering for Crankworx, the biggest mountain biking festival in the world. It's held here every year for ten days and all the hard-core (really, really hard-core, not just wanna-be hard-core. There is a difference, trust me.) bikers the world over converge on Whistler in an attempt to prove just how institutionalised they really should be. Volunteering got us front-row positions at all of the best events and so much free stuff that we've almost doubled our baggage. At final count we'd collected 11 beers, four shirts, one ugly-as-sin truckers hat, one pair of gloves, one Wii game, oodles of sunscreen and lipbalm, countless bottles of energy water and Monster cans, four bike park passes, five free smoothies, one cow bell and at least one of us acquired a cracking hangover from the after-party. The last few days the temperature hit 35 degrees, proving that it does indeed get hot in Whistler.

Crankworx craziness

Late last week we took the gondola up Blackcomb mountain for some spectacular views over the valley. There's still some snow around and it's possible to take a chairlift right to the peak and hike through the wild flowers. We have that on our agenda for the next couple of days as the weather was rubbish last week.

Atop Whistler mountain

Today Glenn convinced Bec that it would be pretty poor, given that we have the best bike park in the world at our disposal, if she didn't ride the park at least once. And so we utilised one of our free passes and went riding together in the bike park. Bec felt rather lame on the chairlift wearing her helmet from England and a pair of sneakers while everyone else was decked out in full-face helmets, knee and elbow guards and full-body armour. To his credit, Glenn didn't disown Bec, whose days of riding to Shalom College did nothing to prepare her for the Whistler Mountain Bike Park and the humiliation of being overtaken by six year-olds on baby blue bikes. Ignorance is bliss and Bec would have preferred if most of Glenn's sentences didn't start with such things as 'It gets pretty steep here..........' and 'You'll go over the handle bars if you............'. Bec did two green runs, then left Glenn at the park to re-instate his social cred by doing a few black runs. There are no pictures because Bec is not proud of her sub-optimal riding ability.

Bear sightings occur regularly. They're pretty much everywhere, including on the front steps of the bank which was slightly unnerving for Bec who intended using the cash machine. Bec also spotted one crossing the road at a pedestrian crossing. Using the crossing clearly didn't absolve the bear of whatever sin it committed in the village because it was hastily followed by two wildlife rangers with guns. Un-bear-able. Sorry, bad bear pun.

Bear vs bike

Plans for Iowa remain complex but will eventually sort themselves out and we should see ourselves there in the first week of September.