Winter Wonderland (3rd and final)!

(Its a long one so don't feel you have to read it all in one hit!)

So back to my holiday! Feels like ages ago now that I’ve been back for a month!

It was a bit of an ordeal getting from Montreal to Vancouver, my flight was initially delayed 3 hours, then 4, then 5 and we eventually took off around 6 hours after the scheduled departure time! So instead of overlapping nicely with my parents in Vancouver airport we missed each other, the reason? Too much snow! Vancouver had had a massive dumping of snow over the weekend and the airport just wasn’t coping. My brother had been patiently waiting for me for around 6 hours so we were both relieved when my bags were some of the first off the plane – we got home around 4 am Van time which was 7 am Montreal time – what a long day!

The next morning I met my lovely little nephew for the first time, he is such a cutie and I couldn’t help but fall in love with him at first sight. I think there is definitely something about kinship that gives you stronger ties. He had a little bit of stranger shyness at first but this soon disappeared as he quickly realized he had me wrapped around his little finger.

I’d been hoping for a white Xmas since I’d left Australia and I certainly wasn’t disappointed with piles of snow everywhere and more snow falls each day! I was certainly more excited about it all than Malcolm, who shoveled out half the street in parking, the path to the house and the footpath outside the house pretty much every day! The snow made for some interesting Xmas celebrations – including cooking the Turkey on the BBQ (not usually done in Canada) and eating by candlelight! We lost power about halfway into cooking the turkey so had to improvise with a gas stove and gas BBQ with hood. Despite the somewhat unusual cooking procedure we came up with a delicious Xmas dinner. The snow also meant that we didn’t actually open our Xmas pressies until Boxing Day as we woke up at Kaila’s dad’s place on Xmas morning sans presents! H—certainly did the best out of all of us for shear volume of presents, though I think he was much more interested in the paper! I received a lovely pile of pressies – much more than expected (fortunately they all fitted in my luggage to come home) including a very cool pressie of ski goggles from M&K.

We spent the days after xmas generally relaxing at home and enjoying each other’s company, with a couple of exciting excursions thrown in for good measure! Malcolm and I headed out to the Canucks game against the Edmonton Oilers (a local darby). It was my first ice-hockey match and I loved it! We had great seats on the goal line with good elevation so you could see the whole field and really get a feel for how the game worked. Having a good knowledge of field hockey it was easy to follow the positional play. Unfortunately the Canucks lost, but I still found it an exciting game as they came back it the last 2 periods.

After days of watching the weather forecasts Malcolm picked the perfect day for us to go skiing. Because of all the snow we’d already decided it was going to be too hard to get to Whistler (next time!) so we went local, choosing Grouse Mountain, whose car park has the lowest elevation, and hence is the easiest to get out of if heavy snow falls. I had a great day skiing – I still had my ski legs from the Perisher holiday and was carving my way down the mountain! It was lots of fun, though I did have to keep reminding myself about my technique which I tend to lose a bit if I’m not thinking about it enough! We started on the green slopes then headed to the blues – one was pretty techy at the top and the eased out as you got further down the mountain – it was a good challenge. The runs were probably similar in length to the aussie ones I’ve done, but had good snow cover so were very enjoyable.

We made it out to Granville Island for a pit of culture and dreaming over beautiful artwork and furniture and Kaila and I had a fun afternoon shopping leaving the boys at home. We came back to find them both on the couch, worn out!

I had a fantastic time in Van, hanging out with my family and relaxing, it was a lovely end to a great holiday and meant I arrived back in Australia feeling relaxed and like I’d had a holiday! Thanks to everyone who made my holiday really special and so much fun!