vacation photos - blog style

After my prolonged leave of absence I'm back baby! I had a killer time in British Columbia and I have a lot of awesome pictures to prove it. A few funny things happened when I was there and I'll get to those things eventually. They say a picture's worth a thousand words, but rather than writing out thirteen thousand words I'll just show you some of my favorites.

This is my sister Laura and I as she was dropping me off at the airport. If I'm going to take pictures of my trip I might as well start from the beginning right?



I've never flown over the rockies before - I was lucky enough to have a window seat and a clear day to get a bunch of wicked pictures. Several times on my trip I was blown away by how beautiful everything was. On my way home I actually saw an avalanche happening - definitely an amazing sight.



My first day there I went to the aquarium in Stanley Park (more Stanley in a bit). The aquarium was cool - you can get so close to the animals and I got a lot of great pictures here too. I was hoping to see some orca, but all they had there were belugas. [Did you know belugas are the only porpoises that have 'necks'? All others fused vertebrae - now you know]. This seal would be best friends with Chris Harris: when a keeper came to feed him he didn't swim over and beg for fish - it wasn't his style - he kind of just floated over slowly and had the keeper drop fish in one by one.



The next day I hiked Grouse Mountain - climbing a mountain sounds like a hell of a lot of work and it is. It took about two hours to climb and by the time we got to the top it was getting dark, so we took the tram down. In hindsight we really should have taken the tram in both directions, but at least now I can say I climbed a mountain. The whole trail on the way up is surrounded by tall pines with a canopy 75-100 feet tall, very impressive.



Later that week I had a chance to walk around Stanley Park by myself. Stanley is the second largest urban park in the world [Central Park is first] and it has a sweet bike/walking path going around it's shoreline [10 Km]. As I was walking there was a cool arch that had a stream running through it.



This is Siwash rock: native legend has it that it was a man turned into a rock by the "transformer" but something tells me it's just a rock, after all the worlds not on back of a turtle is it.



This is form of art that people do along the shore-line of stanley park. The rocks are carefully balanced not glued or cemented. At first I doubted this, as did the asian tourists that were in the park too. Thankfully [for me] a couple went over and knocked down one of the statues much to the distain of one of the artists who yelled at them for ruining something that took him hours to do.



This was at the point that I realized that walking 10 Km takes a lot longer than you might think.



The highlight of my trip was definitely Whistler! I've never been to such a beautiful place in my whole life!



The weather was good but the conditions weren't that amazing [but snowboarding in May is snowboarding in May!] My favorite thing was probably that I was snowboarding up at the top with a high of five degrees [c], then when we got to the bottom is was 25.



The drive to and from whistler is amazing - lakes and mountains along the whole highway - this is on the way back.



There were amazing sunsets while I was there. These are from a beach that's downtown.



Initially I was pissed that this happy couple got in my way, now I think it makes for a great picture [in that ideal post-card romance-exists kind of way].



So there you go - my trip in a few pictures. My next post will be in a couple of days and will focus on the funnier aspects of the trip - thanks for being patient.