Hello everyone!!
So I haven’t been very on time with these emails… but on the up side you probably aren’t fed up with hearing from us yet because of it (fingers crossed).
Chiraag will be helping me write them from now on, and so you can tell the difference between who wrote what my sections will be in pink and his will be in blue :) If you don't get colour for some reason: a) Your computer is weird, b) sorry I was being insensitive to your colour-blindness, c) you'll have to guess who said what...
Last time I wrote we were in Whistler enjoying the snow.... And we did that for quite a while after that... But eventually Spring came to Whistler.
Actually Spring came really quickly to Whistler. One week it was freezing and the snow on the side of the roads and paths was up to my shoulder, and a couple of weeks later most of the snow in the village was gone and there was grass and flowers popping up in its place. In between snow and flowers there was a little while where everything looked dirty – as the snow melted the layers of grit and litter and dog poo that had been hidden under the perfect white came to the top… but much much quicker than I would have guessed we could see the shoulders of the roads, and all the other parts of the town that had been hiding themselves.
I loved Whistler in the Winter because it was different and exciting and white (Chiraag loved it for the skiing and the powder), but I loved it more in the Spring because everything became accessible. All of a suden there were all these beautiful walks that we could get to – like around lakes that started to peek through from under the ice. There was also a festival in Whistler with free art, free music (we saw the cat empire, but missed Ash Grunwald because of work) and awesome ski and board jump displays. And there was still skiing (though not as much powder) – with both mountains open until late April. Chiraag was still skiing a lot and I was skiing a lot more than I was at first.
In the Spring we started to see how transient Whistler is – a lot of our friends went home or onto more travels, but luckily Rob and Mary (an English couple who lived down the road in Creekside) were sticking around almost as long as us. Luckily they’re also great!
Mary is a lot of the reason I got more into skiing – she was great to ski with because I didn’t feel as much pressure with her – I often felt like I was holding Chiraag back when I went out with him. She was also AMAZINGLY positive - everything I did was fantastic. Even better though, she was really good about taking me onto new and harder runs – before each one we would stop and go through what the run was like in detail, comparing it to runs I was familiar with and knew I could handle. I wish I’d started skiing with Mary as soon as we’d arrived in Whistler. (ps. Rob and Mary both snowboard – so Mary had asked other skiiers what to look out for when she was with me so she could give me pointers).
With so many people leaving Whistler, and the mountains closing and the snow getting worse we started to think about our next move. As you know we came out to Canada to get jobs, settle down and experience the Canadian life. Whistler was just a little break before that.
When we started to think about all of this though we came to the realisation that we really, deeply, did not want to get jobs!
We’d been so happy and got so used to the holiday lifestyle that we decided to just keep doing that! So our new plan is to keep doing that until we run out of money or have to come home for Kirsten’s wedding…
This did leave us with a new very stressful question – where would we go and how would we travel for the next 6 months??! (I’m sure you feel very sorry for us with all our troubles). Without going into all the options we looked at, we were inspired by our housemate and decided to drive around America and Canada in some kind of van (that we could sleep in). We started looking for some such vehicle within the pricerange: ‘as cheap as possible’ to ‘not so cheap it would fall to pieces’.
So after lining up a few vans that we liked the look of online, we headed down to Vancouver on the greyhound. The one we liked most pretty much looked like the A-team van and was pretty pimped out on the inside with red leather everywhere. Unfortunately, when we got a mechanic to have a look at it he found quite a few problems that were going to cost at least $1000 to fix, and said it probably wouldn’t be great for the big road trip we were wanting to do, so we were back to square one, since we had decided we didn’t want any of the others we’d looked at.
We had planned to head back to Whistler that day, after buying that van, for a friend's leaving drinks. But after a bit of deliberating and scrambling, we decided to rent a car and have a look at a couple of other vans that were a bit more expensive, since they were newer and a bit better equipped as well (with a proper fridge, stove, etc.). Luckily, out of those, we managed to find one that we liked! So we told the owners we were interested and headed back to Whistler.
That night got very messy, with Megan and Mary having WAY too much to drink. I ended up doing a fair bit of babysitting after Rob headed home early and the rest of the party decided to be sensible a bit later on as well. Both the girls were a write off the next day. Megan made it to work in the afternoon, but had to go home after an hour or so
Anyway, the mechanic didn’t find any major problems with the new van, so we headed back down to Vancouver and bought it. We have since named it Beazley (after Kim). The drive back to Whistler was interesting. The van stalled a few times on the highway back, but it turns out that it was probably because the fuel gauge wasn’t super accurate and we were actually running out of fuel. Luckily, we were near a 'gas' station when it really started struggling, and the rest of the trip was worry free after filling up!
(Little did we know that this was was setting the tone for the next few weeks at least – good old Beazley has not been as nice to us as I would have liked…)
So after almost 3 great months, we left Whistler - a bit earlier than planned.
Or at least we tried, after we got about 30 minutes down the road Megan remembered that the passports were still in her bottom drawer! So we turned back around. After we’d picked them up, we got 10 minutes down the road and remembered we’d left behind the extension cord! (that was also my fault as I'd used it last) After picking that up, we finally got on our way properly, but had lost the early start we had tried for. The drive through the Rockies was pretty spectacular! Lots of mirror lakes, snow covered peaks and forest the whole way, and we even saw a bear on the side of the road! However, an hour or so out of Kelowna (our destination for the first day), Beazley started struggling again, and overheated going up a long uphill stretch. There was a bit of smoke, and the coolant was bubbling – not great signs! So we pulled over on the highway where we conked out and made some lunch while we waited for Beazley to cool down. This was pretty much why we thought of the name Beazley – because the van is big, struggles up hills, and is an Aussie in North America.
Luckily, after lunch, the van started, and we were back on our way, taking it a bit easier up the hills and keeping a closer eye on the temperature gauge.
We spent our first night from Whistler in a state park in Kelowna, right by the lake. We even got a fire going! It was very pleasant. We spent the next day buying a few things for the van, and then checking out a few wineries, most of which were surprisingly good. Who would’ve thought that there would be good wineries in Canada?! After the trial run the previous night in a proper camp site, we headed bush that night and found a spot all by ourselves in the woods. It felt much more like proper camping – we made a fire with wood we found, had no-one around us, and peed in the bushes, and we didn’t get eaten by bears.
(from here I am going to use mostly dot points for places we have been – otherwise these emails will be like novels)
Lake Louise - Canada
Further into the Rockies (or into them for the first time – we’re not too sure where the Rockies actually start) we visited Claire – who we met in the immigration line at Vancouver airport. She now works in the backpackers in L. Louise - Claire is cool. She organised a free night in the hostel for us, cooked for us, gave us good advice about the area, and was great company – even taking us to a local party.
Lake Louise is famous for its perfect blue colour that it gets because the water is pure and comes from the glacier above it. It reflects the amazing mountains around it perfectly – like a mirror. When we saw it, it was frozen and cloudy. Don’t get me wrong – it was still beautiful. The surrounding mountains rise out of it in almost-cliffs and go up jaggedly into snow topped giants. The lake is huge, and the forrest around it dense, it’s just that the lake we saw was not the one you see in pictures.
We went for a walk up to a lookout over the lake, and one around the lake to see the glacier – where I got pretty wet, despite my awesome gum boots (possibly because I made a snow angel and ran through the river…).
Banff
Was busy becase it was a long weekend. Went for some nice walks, but didn’t like it as much as Lake Louise. It would have been better in proper winter or summer – there was not enough snow to ski, but too much to do a lot of the walks. We were going to stay two nights but just stayed the one.
Calgary
We headed to Galgary to visit Chiraag’s first babysitter Rosemary and her family – Jon, Mija and Sebastian. Chiraag hadn’t seen Rosemary since he was 4. I had met Rosemary and John Twisha’s wedding, but only very briefly. Despite this old and short history they could not have been more welcoming and nice to us. We felt at home immediately and I particularly liked hearing stories about what Chiraag was like as a baby (difficult – lets all remember that if we have trouble kids… I was a perfect baby and small child, so anything other than that must come from him).
Mija and Sebatian were fantastic. Because of my superior personality they liked me immediately and we spent the next day or so running around and playing. This conviently left Chiraag free to rope Jon into helping fix the van. A couple of days earlier we had discovered that all the pipes to and from the water tank were so old that they were full of cracks and gushed water when we tried to fill said tank. John got into it and tore everything out so that we could replace it all (again – apparently Jon did most of the replacing).
Our last day in Calgary we went to the Zoo with Rosemary, Mija and Sebastian. Last time we went to a zoo it was with Helen and Silas. Zoo’s are much more tiring with kids who can walk. It was good though – we saw all the animals we had missed in the wild, and Mija kept us informed about everything we saw.
We left Calgary from the zoo and headed South (to America).
I have realised that my dot points have not made this email much shorter, so I’m going to leave it here and save the next bit for another email very soon!
Love Megan and Chiraag!!
xxx
States we have been to to date:
British Columbia (Canada)
Alberta (Canada)
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