Goodbye USA, Hello Brazil!

After another dreaded 20+ hour bus journey from Denver, in which the guy next to us got arrested, we arrived in Chicago for a big McDonald reunion! It had been 5 months since last seeing my mum, dad and brother at Christmas in Whistler and 5 years since seeing my family who live in the states! It was great to be reunited with everyone and even better in an amazing city.

After Chicago and some emotional goodbyes it was time to head to New York via all over the place on the Greyhound bus. We were staying in the Bronx so it took us a while to get to the main site seeing places. We just had two days there so we had to pack a lot in so we could see all the main things we wanted to. We took the free (yes, free!) ferry to Staten Island which gives you a good view of the Statue of Liberty and Manhattan skyline – which didn’t disappoint.

In the two days we spent time at Times Square, walked around Central Park, saw the Friends building (disappointed Central Perk has now shut down), went to Grand Central Station, saw the Empire State (didn’t go up) and went to the 9/11 memorial – which was a very humbling and surreal experience.

19 Days, 4900 Miles, 11 States, 8 National Parks & a Tornado Warning

And the USA road trip part of our travels is over… What an amazing few weeks it’s been! In the 19 days we had the car, we clocked up almost 5,000 miles and more impressively 0 speeding, parking fines or crashes – good job Kyle!

After California it was onto Vegas baby! I had been to Vegas about 8 years ago with my family so I was looking forward to visiting again and taking advantage of true Vegas now I’m of age. As much as we were excited, we were almost just as nervous…. about our gambling tendencies in the big city. Our gambling wins once paid for us to go on a ski holiday! As tempting as it would have been to blow our daily budget in a couple of hours minutes, we were well behaved. We actually came out about $100 on top. I say we, but it was Kyle that did the winning to cover my overall losses!

It was a flying visit in Vegas as we only had 2 nights there. The weather let us down and we didn’t get the ‘lazing by a pool’ hotness that there was before and after our stay (this seems to be a reoccurring theme with the weather – read on), but we had a great few days.

Busy taking photos instead of navigating

View from the room

My winnings

Another win for Kyle

Best fountains in the world

California Dreaming

The road trip part of our USA travels has begun, we are now in Utah after visiting Vegas and the Grand Canyon but I’ll leave that for the next blog. I started writing this on the way to San Diego, so the next issue may be a while!

After our stop offs at Seattle and Portland, the next stop was San Francisco. We had a 21 hour bus journey from Portland to Seattle, which suprisingly wasn’t too bad, apart from a 5 hour stop at 2am in Sacramento. For the price we couldn’t really complain and it saved splashing out on a hotel for a night… every little helps when you’re on a budget!

I loved San Fran. I don’t want to make a hasty decision but it may just have made it to the top of my favorite city list…. For now! (Vancouver is now second FYI!). In the three days we were there we walked across the Golden Gate Bridge, visited Alcatraz, went to the Golden Gate park, spent time at Fishermans Wharf, went to a baseball game for a bargain of £4 each and saw the house of a childhood hero of mine – Mrs Doubtfire!

Alcatraz in the distance

San Francisco

Golden Gate Bridge

Sunset at Fishermans Wharf

Fishermans Wharf

Alcatraz

San Fran skyline from the boat

In the hole

San Fran Giants vs San Diego Padres

First baseball game

Mrs Doubtfire’s House

So the USA Journey Begins…. First Stops Seattle & Portland!

‘We’re not interested in the travelling/backpacking thing’ said Laura and Kyle a mere 7 months ago… We are now owners of backpacks and I’m currently sat writing this from a hostel about to travel for another 6 months-ish! Ah, how things change!

Our first stop was/is Seattle, where I am currently writing this where I started writing this (We are now on a 21 hour bus journey to San Fran, but I’ll get to that!) We had planned to take a trip to Seattle whilst we were in Whistler but never got around to it. So, Seattle was always going to be our first stop after Vancouver plus it made sense logistically.

We made a decision to not visit Vancouver Island (on this trip) as the weather wasn’t looking great and it’s best to go in summer to take advantage of the beaches and activities. So the day after deciding this we headed to Seattle. With it being a very last minute decision, our choice of affordable accommodation was slim pickings. We found a hostel, The Green Tortoise for $38 a nights in a great location, we couldn’t pass this up.

I’ve been somewhat of a sceptic of staying in hostels but we were both surprised how good it was. The free tacos been served an hour after arriving definitely swayed us! The rooms were pretty good, although we couldn’t get in the same room due to booking the previous day and the bathrooms for a hostel were great. Highly recommended. We even bumped into some people we knew from Whistler!

Seattle was good, we saw the main things we wanted to – The Fishermans Market, The first Starbucks and The Spaceneedle.  The Fishermans Market, as become a tourist attraction (Google – Seattle Fish Market videos), so that was really cool to see. Although there wasn’t quite as much fish throwing as seen on the video. The Space Needle was also cool to see, albeit from a distance and the ground.

We met up with a fellow travel blogger who lives in Seattle, Kimberely from On This Trail. It was great to meet someone from the blogging world and even better a local who could show us some of the sports not all tourists would get to see.

 

Where did I park my boat?!

The famous fish throwing market

The Space Needle at night

Thanks for showing us this spot Kimberly!

A Whistler Season in Numbers & Photos

*Geeky post alert* I like a good stat, but working in a no brain required job for 6 months hasn’t given me the chance to do any ‘number crunching’.

I really should be packing or doing something useful with my time, as we leave tomorrow (eeekkk)… but here are some stats from our season at Whistler Blackcomb:

Number of days up the mountain – 65 (63 snowboarding 2 skiing)

Distance boarded – 570 miles

Number of marked runs completed – 60 ish

Fastest speed – 41.4mph (13mph on skis)

Vertical Drop – 338,621 feet

Days worked – 113

Number of people validated – 50,000

Value of amount of tickets sold – At least $500,000 (i.e a pittance of what I’ve earnt – about $3,500!)

Highest amount sold in one day – $24,000

Amount spent on food at Whistler Blackcomb stores – $510 – Kyle spent £190

Times staff discount used – 125

Amount of Kokanee drunk – Undisclosed

Number of photos taken – A sh*tload

Views of my blog – 4,500 – Thank you for reading 🙂 I’m always surprised when more people than my mum read my blogs!

It’s so difficult to pick just a few photos which sums up our season, but here goes…

Bluebird Days, Outings to Vancouver & The Final Countdown

This time next week we will be jobless, homeless and no longer living in the Whistler bubble. We’ll be in Vancouver for a couple of nights before going to Vancouver Island then heading down the West Coast. Spring has arrived in Whistler and we’re loving the weather! The last few weeks in Whistler have been great, we’ve had a bit more snow, some awesome bluebird days and we’ve made a couple of trips to Vancouver for football and hockey games.

Going back a few weeks we had 35cm of snow overnight when the forecast only predicted about 5cm – always  nice surprise  Luckily we had already planned to get out early (6am!) for our last Fresh Tracks Breakfast of the season. Pow and a bluebird – what a day that was!

4 Weeks to Go…

I can’t believe we’ve only got a month left to go in Whistler (it’s also been over a month since I last posted – soz avid readers!) Time has gone so quickly, it feels only months ago that we were counting down the weeks to flying out to Canada. It’s going to be tough to leave, but it helps that we’ve got some pretty exciting travel plans in place!

Since I last wrote our travel plans for Whistler have changed a little, we are no longer planning on going to Australia and Asia as it’s too expensive to fly there from South America and Whistler is killing our bank balance. We are still planning on doing our trip round America which we’ve pretty much got sorted now – woohoo. We will be leaving Whistler on the 22nd April to go to Vancouver Island. From there we will be heading down to Seattle -> San Fran -> San Diego -> LA -> Vegas Baby -> Gran Canyon -> Salt Lake City – > Yellowstone -> Cody – > Denver – > New York -> Washington -> Chicago then finally to Miami before heading to Brazil. I’m tired just reading that list, we’ll be driving over 4,000 miles in just over a month! Then after Brazil for the World Cup, we will be going to go to a few other countries in South America, starting with Peru, Bolivia, Argentina and Chile. Money will determine where we go next/when we book those dreaded one-way tickets back to the UK.

Okay, back to Whistler… these last few weeks have been great. The snow has continued to fall through March and we’ve had some epic powder days:

 

Snow Much Fun

The snow is back!!! I had faith it would return and it’s back with a vengeance. Whistler was having the worst season in about 20 years, even the BBC pointed out last week that some Scottish resorts have more snow than here in Whistler… but not anymore! In the last 7 days we’ve had over 140cm of snow fall and it doesn’t look like it’s going to stop anytime soon.

Like the last time we had a lot of snow, my days off fell at the perfect time. For my first day off we had about 15cm of pow then the second we had 35cm! Like everyone else I got up for the first lift at 8.15 so there were big queues which weren’t moving due to waiting on avalanche clearance. Well worth the wait though, even the main groomed runs still had great snow on them and we found good stashes of powder. I had so much fun going down some of the bowls and tree runs. Boarding from 8.30-3 both days killed me off – definitely the most tired I’ve been. The snow hasn’t stopped since then and I now have two days off again to enjoy even better powder!

3 Months into Whistler Life

Can’t believe it’s been 3 months since we left our jobs, flat and life in the UK to fly out to Vancouver for the winter season. Time is flying by and I can’t even remember what back home was like (exaggerating now, it hasn’t been that long). It only feels like weeks ago we were last minute planning everything and writing a blog ‘3 Months to Go’. Whistler life seems very normal to me now – waking up at ridiculous a.m on both work days and snowboarding days, drinking Kokanee, a Canadian beer and tedious work. I found out this week that I’ve already scanned over 12,000 people this season whilst validating and I’ve probably said ‘Hey, how you doing?’ (in a non-Joey way, people just don’t understand ‘you alright?! so that’s easier) to almost all of them…. that’s a lot of people!

So what’s new?! We still haven’t had snow for two and a half weeks, since my last post when we had 70cm in a couple of days. We are due a whole 8cm in the next few days, which we usually wouldn’t get excited about but every little bit of snow helps at the minute. It’s been sooo hot this week, it was 13 degrees at the top of the mountain a couple of days ago. Literally like spring skiing, not that I’ve ever skied in spring, but that’s how I assume it will be! Enjoyed not having having to wear 10 layers whilst boarding and having a beer outside at the top of the mountain, but I will be relieved when it cools down again and we get some much needed snow. A few recent pics:

Snow Gods, Fresh Powder & Whistler Fame…

The snow (proper snow) has finally arrived in Whistler. After a slow start to the season for snowfall, the last week saw over 90cm of snow fall! We were forecasted to receive 20cm on Friday night, which for the season we are having would have been great, instead we got 49 whole cm’s overnight with the snow still falling heavily on throughout Saturday. Luckily I had the weekend off, which is a rare occasion in Whistler as weekends are the busiest time for my work, to do a Women’s Snowboard Camp here.

I was like a very excitable 5 year old at Christmas to go out and play in the fresh powder (for once!). Even better that I was on a 2 day training camp so it was the perfect opportunity to learn how to snowboard in proper snow :-). The Arc’teryx womens camp was good fun and think I’ve finally managed to get there with snowboarding! The good snow conditions made it much easier for me to turn down a lot steeper runs than I have been doing. I did my first tree run, first black run and we even hit the park at the end of the day on Sunday… haven’t quite mastered jumping yet! Although I did get the tiniest bit of air on a ‘jump’ yesterday and I didn’t fall – that’s progress right there 🙂

Good day to have lift line priority!

Fresh pow in the trees