Exodus

I am continuing on with my Washington/Canada vacation. I last left off with Ru and I arriving in Squamish, BC late at night and checking ourselves into an older motel. Things often look entirely different in the morning, and I was thrilled when I opened the dreary motel room curtains to this view:


When vacationing with little disposable income, it becomes necessary to improvise a bit along the way. Since we pretty much came to the conclusion that while Vancouver looked like it had some nice window shopping, there wasn’t really much there in the city that we couldn’t find in Seattle, so we headed on further north towards Whistler.

Along the highway, I spotted a sign that had a silhouette of a hiker and the name Brandywine Falls, so we pulled over. The falls turned out to be less than a kilometer from the highway and were spectacular!

Additionally, there was a 3.5 km trail leading to a suspension bridge so we did that as well, first attempting the unmarked route and then doubling back after losing the way when we came to a wall of loose boulders. We did eventually make it all the way to the bridge, and I think our spontaneous stop turned into a 10 km hike!

Next we continued on to Whistler, which turned out to be a very well-manicured ski resort area. While there was still plenty of snow, I don’t think it was particularly the best time to ski, but we enjoyed walking around the shops and had a nice dinner at a local deli and flirted with a cute coffee barista. It turns out that both Ru and I are suckers for men with accents.

I have only ever attempted skiing once. After feeling that I had mastered snow plowing on a bunny slope, I insisted that I was ready for a “real run” and proceeded to pull every muscle in my legs, taking well over an hour to complete the run. The next time I go out, I’m definitely going for real lessons rather than 5 minutes of guidance from an acquaintance!

After that, we decided to head back to “the States”. The day before, we had “borrowed” a tulip from Stanley Park to take with us on the road. Seeing as how it was the end of the tulip season there, the poor flower continued to drop petals over the course of the two days. It finally gave up the last one just before we crossed back over the Canadian border.

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Although our trip wasn’t what we had originally planned, it still turned out to be a lot of fun. I think we did pretty well too, having only offended two Canadians (that we know of) during the course of our stay.

The first was a bank teller in Squamish, who Ru was chatting with about exchange rates. She commented on how she had thought that the British pound and the Canadian dollar should be more similar in value then they are. All of a sudden the teller retorted, “We ARE our OWN country!”

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Our next “victim” was a pharmacist close to the Canadian border. I was once again checking prices on some things, When I found out that the cash price of one of medications that I was interested in was only a few dollars more than the co-pay here, I said, “I’ll take two of them!”

The pharmacist kind of paused and gave me a strange look and said that I’d need a Canadian prescription for it.

Without even thinking about it I said, “Really? In Mexico, I can just pay cash for whatever I want.”

At that point, he rather sternly reminded me that I most certainly was not in Mexico.

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Oh well, so much for diplomacy…