The adventures resume.....

We're coming to the end of our 5 week stay in Vancouver. It has been interesting and wet! After leaving behind wildfires in Texas and floods in California, we knew we were likely to cause some major weather occurrence here in Vancouver. And sure enough, we almost broke a 50 year old weather record. In 1950 something, Vancouver recorded 28 consecutive days of rainfall. On the 17th of December it began to rain, and it just didn't stop! Come the 14th of January, and it was still raining! We were just one day shy of equalling the record. But it was not to be, and not a drop of rain was felt on the 15th. Vancouverites heaved a collective groan of dismay after putting up with 27 consecutive days of rain and only coming in second place!

For Christmas we made the most of the cheap electronic goods in Canada, and bought ourselves a nice new Christmas present - a Canon Digital Rebel XT (8 MegaPixel SLR camera), which was used to take all of the pictures in this blog entry.

Fortunately we were able to use the wet time well, doing some work for Toby's company - turning Mike & Victoria's dining room into our make-shift office. We also took advantage of the fact that it was snowing in the mountains while it was raining on the city, and took some snowboarding lessons. The snow wasn't great at first, but it was enough, and we started getting the hang of snowboarding after a few lessons.

We spent a day out at the world famous Whistler-Blackcomb resort with Mike Baumgartner and Mark & Nikki, which was incredible (if a little cold at -7°C!). We began to understand why the Eskimos have so many different words for snow, as we saw powder, fluff, slush, ice, beautiful star-shaped snowflakes and little 'polystyrene' balls. The whole experience was capped by an awesome day of snowboarding on half a metre of fresh powder under clear skies yesterday - apparently it was the best day of the season so far and lots of people seemed to skip work to be on the mountains.

We spent a few days visiting Meris' aunt and uncle, Margaret and Tom and their dog Katie, out in the Okanagan valley, about 5 hours drive from Vancouver. It snowed continuously on the drive out there, and we had beautiful fresh dry powder to go snowshoeing and snowboarding in. The snowy landscapes are unbelievably beautiful and peaceful.
Although the snow has been fun we've missed the sun, so on Monday we fly to Hawaii to catch up on our tans. Can't believe we only have 3 weeks of holiday left!