Canada

The Pemberton Festival has come to town!! Or at least to Pemberton anyways. PemFest, as it has affectionately become known, is to Canada what Splendor in the Grass is to Australia and what Glastonbury is to the UK. Basically, it's a huge music festival spanning three days and several hundred acres of potato fields just outside a tiny village called Pemberton, 40 minutes north of Whistler.

And, of course, Bec wanted in. So as a means of reliving her Big Day Out days while simultaneously hoping to generate feelings of renewed youth in view of her looming milestone birthday, Bec set about getting herself involved. Eventually she landed her dream job: making and selling popcorn!!! Mmmmmm popcorn. Considerable excitement ensued, given especially that popcorn constitutes a large part of Bec's diet. And so Bec spent two days selling popcorn and lemonade to the sounds of some of the world's best rock bands at the foot of spectacular Mount Currie. She slept at the campsite with 40 000 other people, drank beer and ate poutine and loved every minute of it apart from getting home. Logistical transport teething problems made sleeping outside the Greyhound Station look like the most viable option for Bec and her two new and equally frustrated friends from Calgary until (cue Hallehujah chorus) the arrival of Dan the Taxi Driver from Heaven who transported the tired threesome home and scored a 100% tip for his efforts. Total time taken to get home: 5 hours and 20 minutes for what is usually a 40 minute drive.

The view from the popcorn stand

Popcorn queen!!

Tent city and a familiar tent

Wolfmother on stage-cam

We can hardly believe how fast time is flying here!! We're almost half way through our time in Canada.

Canada Day was July 1st and lots of people were out and about watching the parade and having a Kokanee afterwards. Whistler's parade was fairly controversial this year because the organising committee decided to make it a 'green' parade, meaning non-motorised floats only which apparently halved the size of the parade and made the locals unhappy. Still, plenty of fun was had by all, Canadian or otherwise.

Canada Day Kids

Every Wednesday here the mountain runs a social bike race called the Phat Wednesday bike race, which usually involves about 200 riders riding down the mountain and drinking free beer afterwards. Glenn crashed his bike before the start of the last race, so instead of the 'I'm finished, meet you at the Longhorn for drinks in ten minutes' phone call, Bec received the 'I've crashed my bike and am at the hospital' phone call. Accumulating more good-wife points, Bec dutifully put down her wine, abondoned her icecream and turned off the real estate channel and went to the hospital where she found Glenn having nine stitches put in his knee in the Paediatric Trauma Room (hehehe about the paediatric part). Five hours, nine stitches and a considerable amount of money later we left the hospital. The follwing day Bec went down to the second hand store and bought a pair of crutches (from a selection of no less than 9 pairs, there's clearly a huge market for crutches in this town) to replace the modified vacuum cleaner pole we found in the house.

Casualty in Canada

The knee isn't healing as well as we'd hoped in terms of regaining movement so Glenn hasn't been on the bike in about three weeks, which is fairy gutting given it's rather the point of being here. So we've taken to wandering around town with the camera and walking the valley trails. There's a few more bikers on the hill now in preparation for Crankworx so the action is more hardcore and lends itself to great photography.

Hardcore bikeboy

We've received our schedules for Crankworx which will see us both on the mountain showing the pro's where to go. Bec volunteered the other day for the BC Bike Race and found herself at the bottom of three flights of stairs, wearing a high-vis vest and screaming 'Get off your bike, take it up the stairs and cross the bridge at the top!' at more than 400 cyclists and three guys on dirtbikes who chose to take the lift instead of the stairs. We're immersing ourselves into Whistler life and took ourselves out clubbing the other night which prompted us to think of the last time we'd had nightclub stamps on our wrists and decided we must have been about 21 years old which, incidently, was about the average age of the people we went clubbing with!! Riding home through the woods in the dark proved challenging but fun. On Wednesday night we took our warm clothes and went to Lost Lake and watched a movie under the stars.

Bec is in her element avoiding all things related to her upcoming birthday and planning the upcoming travel to Iowa. Glenn became slightly less enthused in the planning when he learnt it the trip would still take three days to get there even if we fly!!

Well, Whistler life seems to suit us and we've settled in to our (not very taxing and completely void of any responsibility) jobs and the one bedroom unit that goes with it. Our days usually consist of rolling out of bed at about 9am and then Glenn will ride in the bike park for a few hours while Bec plays with her cameras. We then usually head to work after lunch and get home at about 10pm while it's still daylight.

Bikeboy

On our days off we try and go hiking or bike riding together. A couple of weeks ago we took a ride along a trail that had some black diamond (second-most hard-core kind of trail) descents full of rocks and tree roots. Bec can now say that she's ridden black diamond at Whistler (even though it wasn't on purpose and she carried the bike most of the way). The woods around here are beautiful, though we're still a little afraid of bears even though popular opinion is that bear attacks are very rare. Glenn reports regular sightings of triplet bear cubs under the bike chairlift on the mountain.

Trail riders!!

Last weekend we parted with a stupid amount of money (such is Whistler life) and hired a car for two days and drove north to a tiny town called Lillooet about three hours out of Whistler. After losing each other at a waterfall on the way, we borrowed a couple of fishing rods from some guys in a sports store in Pemberton to try and realise Bec's life long dream to go trout fishing (and wear the wading pants, especially the wading pants) in a river in Canada. The guys weren't so forthcoming with their trout pants but we took the rods anyway, bought ourselves each a British Columbia fishing license and set off to catch us some trout. With no input from Glenn, and not having fished for at least ten years (Norway excluded), Bec was chuffed with herself for remembering how to thread and cast a fishing line. To no avail though. Our total haul for the weekend equalled two sticks, one large leaf and one piece of miscellaneous lake scum.

Catcher of sticks

Trout fishing

In Lillooet we ate ourselves silly at Dina's Greek Taverna (which, incidently, stocked no Greek beer) and then headed across the road to the local pub where we were soon befriended by some very generous, intoxicated, karaoke-singing, middle-aged locals who insisted on buying us drinks 'because we talk funny'. We had to beat a hasty retreat so as to be in a fit driving state the next day. Glenn did very well in his first foray into driving on the wrong side of the road and was only mildly sick of Bec chanting 'lefty loosey, righty tighty' every time we neared a corner. We drove through some spectacular mountain and lakeside scenery and finished up our road trip at Wal-Mart in Squamish just for funnies.

Canadian barn

We've both volunteered for Crankworx, which is the hard-core mountain bike tournament held in Whistler, and we're awaiting our jobs there so we can mix it with the mountain biking elite here (not that Bec would know anyone remotely famous in the mountain biking fraternity if they were to slap her in the face) and get free stuff.

After much planning and procrastination we both arrived in Vancouver safely, albeit 24 hours apart. We pushed through the jetlag to do a bit of sightseeing around Vancouver (including ten consecutive hours at no less than twelve bike shops where Bec earned some serious good-wife points and after which Glenn was still bikeless) and stuck with the original plan of getting to Whistler ASAP for a summer of mountain biking.

We took the bus up the Sea to Sky Highway to Whistler and took ourselves into the Village to find jobs.

Whistler Village

Glenn's dream job is to work in a bike store and Bec's dream job is to work anywhere there's food and where no one dies. And so Bec headed to the local Supermarket to relive her Franklins days:
Bec: Do you have any jobs?
Them: Do you have any fastfood experience?
Bec: I worked at Maccas for three years
Them: You're hired. Can you start tomorrow?
And that is how Bec arrived at spending 40 hours a week serving icecream cones and making mini pizzas at Whistler Supermarket. As for Glenn, bikeshop jobs are proving elusive so he too has joined the ranks of the Supermarket and can be found stacking rice bran oil and the like into shelves. Which is handy given that the cost of living here will most likely bankrupt us. Someone needs to be keeping an eye on the weekly specials!!

So with jobs sorted, we set about scoping out the Village. It's quite pretty and there's still some snow on the mountains where the snowboarders are getting the last out of the season. Weekdays are pretty quiet, but the weekends are full of bikeboys and bikebitches.

Whistler Bikeboy

Glenn eventually bought a bike and is keen to get onto the mountain. Bec is none too confident that she won't be removing stitches from Glenn before the end of the summer. Bec has invested a lot of time into finding a good vantage point close to decaf coffee in the mornings and beer in the afternoons

We're currently living in a lodge about 4km from the Village. Yesterday there was a bear rummaging around in the neighbours backyard. Cute little fella, though ready to rip my brains out through my nose at the blink of an eye I'm sure. Bear-proof bins are the done thing here and also proved to be Bec-and-Glenn-proof initially.