A little about Whistler and our lives

So I realised today that even though we're not doing a lot at the moment so we can't post a lot, I could write and tell you a bit more about where we're staying because its quite hard to explain why you come halfway round the world to live in tiny bedrooms and clean toilets!


Whistler is about a two hour drive from Vancouver. Its a very new town; it used to be a trail area for the Squamish and Lilooet (I think thats spelt wrong but oh well) First Nations tribes, and then a logging trail, etc. It only really started to be a town in the late 20s, and was then called Alta Lake. It was renamed Whistler in the 60s after the marmots that make a whistling noise in the mountains.

Its a pretty small town with a population of about 9,800, which swells to nearly 40,000 in the winter! This is because Whistler is one of the best places in the world to ski and snowboard, so loads of people around our age come here in the winter, especially Australian people who can easily get a 2 year visa. So people come here to work the winter season for the resort, because this gets you a free lift pass which is worth about $2,000. Its expensive to live here compared to the rest of British Columbia, so people will often work funny hours or two jobs to fit everything in and get their ski pass too. You know its a small town because it only has one gas station which we are right next to. (Just so you know, they have awesome slushies and the guy who owns it still works the counter - and hes a millionaire!)

The town itself is called Whistler and is mainly made up of Whistler Villiage (this is where most of the ski lifts, hotels, clubs etc are) and Whistler Creekside, which is where we are and is more local. There are two mountains which make up the ski resort, Whistler Mountain (which is the one you can see in our pics at the bottom of this post) and Blackcomb Mountain. Both of these make up a lot of ski trails! As well as skiing, Whistler is known worldwide for its mountain biking - there are really awesome trails and lots of bike races - there are always tons of people with full mountain biking gear on in town. Whistler also has, I'm ashamed to say, really beautiful golf courses which give it some of the best golf in the world and also some of the best fishing in the world too. So its a pretty awesome place!


Thats pretty much the basics. Everythings in Whistler; pool, cinema, ice rink, all the ski lifts, bike trails, hiking trials, rock climbing, golfing, skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, horse riding, rock climbing, bla bla bla....

Anyway, here are our pictures of the outside of our house and and idea of how far we have to walk to work and to walk to snowboard when it finally does snow! Its started to rain now, so it should only be about a month or so! And then we can start looking for snowboards etc... its expensive here but you can easily get cheap second hand gear if you want to.


Love Robyn (and Jon)

P.S... We will get round to phoning everyone soon! (Hi Brucie! x)

Edit: P.P.S. Enjoy the new little slideshow gadget we just added at the top right of the blog, we'll change the pictures to our latest set - you can click on it to go straight to the album.

Wal-Mart and work...

Being at work now means that we're really not doing a whole lot else, though we did go to Wal-Mart yesterday. Our boss Ali took us down to Squamish (a full 55 km away) where the nearest one is, and we bought a lamp and pillows and other boring stuff for our room, a 1kg box of exclusively oat cheerios, because they didn't have the 4 grain version in such a big box and Spore... along with a couple of other things. It wasn't the biggest Wal-Mart ever, but it still sold just about everything from street hockey goals to some strange kind of mint marmalade.

We're in our room in the house now, it's pretty small, but big enough for us. Unfortunately, it does have a sloping roof, which is easily low enough to hit your head on on the lower side. Also, the mountain biking guys that have been living here over the summer have pretty low standards of hygeine, so we've had to clean up the bathroom and kitchen already. Still, we pretty much get to be in charge of the winter guests so we'll make sure it doesn't get in a state again.

Robyn is at work dishwashing in the diner right now, and I'm stuck on the Tribal phase of Spore because micromanagement with a laptop touchpad mouse is rubbish. Still, I get to go do some work at the diner in about half an hour, which is more rubbish.

This has been a bit of a boring post, but we're probably going to go hiking tomorrow, because neither of us are working at the diner, so once we've cleaned the hostel around lunchtime we're free to do what we like. Hopefully we'll have some pictures and stuff to upload soon.

Jon