It's been a while since I've posted some new pictures since we've been skiing quite a lot the last couple of weekends (which produced a rather hilarious story involving me and a chairlift...) and I don't take my camera on skitrips. In total we've skied 6 different mountains this season, so it's been a very good season with lots of fresh powder (the surrounding mountains already had somewhere between 7 to 10 meters of snowfall).
So, time for some completely random, unconnected pictures from Vancouver and Vancouver Island:
Hope you like them!
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The Britannia Mining Museum located near Squamish, BC (map link), is built on the grounds of the old Britannia Mines and is a National Historic Site of Canada.
The Britannia Mines opened around 1900 after copper ore was discovered in Britannia Mountain around 1890. After a couple of years, a town had grown around the mine and in 1907 the Post Office was opened in the town. The town had to be relocated in 1915 after an avalanche killed 60 people and destroyed a large part of the camp. The new town became known as Town site or Mount Sheer.
By 1929, the Britannia Mines were the largest copper...
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This weekend we met up with Sabine, a very good friend of ours, to go snowshoeing on Dog Mountain. The Dog Mountain trail starts at the end of the parking lot of the Mount Seymour Ski Area and takes you to an amazing vista of Metro Vancouver and beyond. On clear days you have a 150-200 kilometers far view and you can clearly see Downtown Vancouver, Vancouver Island and all the way into the United States to Mount Baker, The San Juan Islands, Olympic National Park, ...
It's a good 2.5-3 kilometer hike to get to the vista, so in total it's a 6 kilometer snowshoe hike which will take you probably...
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Here's some pictures from the best decorated house in our neighborhood in Port Moody, he spent over 44 hours of work getting it to this state but it's been great to see every single year and it scares the hell out of Grizzly when everything starts moving :)
Happy Halloween!
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Yesterday evening we decided to go for an evening walk. Kris had the wonderful idea to go to Deboville Slough in Port Coquitlam.
The 21.5 km trail takes you through the Minnekhada Regional Park and finishes at the Pitt River Wildlife Sanctuary. There's a lot of bird spotting opportunities along the way, particularly bald eagles and great blue herons.
We obviously didn't walk 21.5 km. We walked until we were able to see Pitt River which was about 5 km (round way). Very easy hike, no elevation gain, but beautiful scenery.
Deboville Slough
One of the reasons we wanted to go was the number...
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The Winter Olympics (Winter itself not so much :) ) have arrived in Vancouver and everybody in Vancouver is hooked. At work everybody is working with the intranet TV broadcasting on their second monitor and cheering every time Canada gets a medal or scores in hockey. So far Canada has 5 medals of which 2 in snowboarding events and we are of course very curious of what the Belgian Ladies Bobsleigh Team is going to do.
Tomorrow we're going to one of the nightly Victory Ceremonies where they hand out the medals to the winners and have a concert of a different Canadian artist every night. Tomorrow...
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Pretty much everyone knows that I'm a big fan of Winter. I've been looking forward to the first snow, and finally it arrived.
We've noticed that the last couple of days, the mountains on the North Shore were getting lots of snow. So today we decided to go to Mount Seymour and enjoy the snow. We were pleasantly surprised with about 50cm of fresh snow!
Of course Grizzly enjoyed this even more than we did! He definitely is a sled dog.
The predictions for next week are really good. They say it's going to snow a little bit in Vancouver later this week. We're living up a mountain so chances are pretty...
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I feel like I have to start all my blog posts with: "I'm sorry we've been so busy we didn't really have time to write something on our blog..."
Having said the previous thing I can start with the actual post!
We did the Whistler Mountain bike thing and it was amazing! It was really intense and a very good exercise for pretty much all your muscles. We got to ride down a mountain:) A fairly big one even!!!:)
No, definitely worth the energy and it's a good deal, not too expensive!
We started of getting some basic instructions about stances, braking, steering,...
After that we did some trails,...
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I know I haven't been updating this blog frequently, but lately I didn't feel like blogging/taking pictures/... so I didn't :)
I won't be writing a lot in this post, just wanted to post some pictures from the last month and a half.
The first picture is a panorama from Canada Place, Vancouver, which is the main cruise ship terminal in Vancouver. It also hosts the Vancouver convention and exhibition center, the Pan Pacific hotel and the 3D Imax theater.
If you look closely, you can see the "Island Princess" cruise ship docked in the middle of the picture. If you ever want to do a cruise to Alaska,...
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The weather has been way too warm the last couple of days. It's currently midnight and it still is 25C outside. When we arrived home at 6:30, the temperature was still 36C. I do enjoy warm weather, but I didn't sign up for Vegas temperatures when I moved to Vancouver. The dog is panting so much I had to get a wet towel to cover him up, now he won't go anywhere without his wet towel...
This weekend was really cool (but warm...), we got some new visitors over, so we got back to doing touristy things. On Saturday we did the mandatory Whistler trip which was nice, but no bears and the biathlon shooting...
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