CRAM: Learning To Whistler

This series of posts tells the tale of a road trip my wifey and I took (sans-kids no less!) across British Columbia and parts of Alberta in July of this year.

We woke up on this fine morning on Vancouver Island.

Our goal was to travel along the Sea-To-Sky Highway (aka Highway 99) from Vancouver to Whistler, and back.  The scuttlebutt being that this road was quite scenic.

I like scenic. Scenic is good.  I'm about to get scenic all up in my face. (etc.)

Since we fell asleep on an island, and our destination... well... isn't, our first course of action was to grab the ferry.

(not pictured: a ferry)

Shortly afterwards (if by shortly afterwards you mean 2.5 hours - its not a quick ferry), we were on the mainland and headed north.  We were soon in scenery so scenic it can only be described as "very."

Before we actually hit the Sea-To-Sky, we visited a lighthouse (see above photo).  It started to rain, and was raining, or misty all day, so everything had a veneer of dampness.

Then we hit the highway, and was soon deep in Gods territory with mountains on one side, and water on the other.  Kinda looks like this:

Just kidding, it looked *exactly* like this.

While were were pulled over at a Provincial Park, a bald eagle flew right over my wifey's head.  I only caught one picture of the swoopin' eagle of doom.

A couple more shots, and we were back on the road.

There were a surprisingly few geocaches along this route, but there were several earth caches.  One of which led us to Shannon Falls.

Shannon Falls is several hundred feel of rock face and falling water.  An impressive sight to behold.

Our next stop was at Brandywine Falls.

Now, if you are me (which you are clearly not, tho you may want to be - and who could blame you?) when you hear the name you think Brandywine, you think river, which leads to The Shire, and the jaunty half-pint Hobbits contained therein.  A little bit of excitement stirs in your soul as a brief fantasy of visting Middle-Earth crosses your mind...

Then it is dashed upon the rocks of reality (stupid reality!).

To get to the Brandywine Falls, one has to cross active train tracks.  We thought we heard a train coming, so we waited.. and waited.., and waited.  Some other folks came along, thought they also heard a train, and they waited.

Eventually one fellow decided to see if he could hear the train on the tracks (I know, right?)

He didn't hear anything.  Eventually we decided what we were hearing was the falls, so we moved on. Soon we were treated to this view.

The trail continued on, and so did we.  Soon we reached the end and was shown this magnificent vista:

So, after this we arrived in Whistler.  Whistler proved to be annoyingly disappointing.  It looks like an awesome resort town, but it was way to busy to enjoy walking around, so we did a u-turn and headed back to Vancouver.

On the way back the rain rained, the wife dozed, and the Dave cranked the tunes and drove along some amazingly beautiful highway.

A couple hours later we arrived in Vancouver and checked into our hotel.  Shortly afterwards we met up with a couple of geocachers who I knew from my podcasting days: The LAN Monkeys, for food and drinks.

Thus ended another day on the road.  Tomorrow we're sticking close to town, but a town we've never been in before, so it should be filled with tales of exploration.

Stay tuned to find out if I'm right.