I took at couple days off in early August and headed up to visit Pat who had just moved to Whistler. I stopped off Wednesday night on the way up at Andrews in Vancouver to pickup Christophe and Mago who were over visiting from Belgium. When Pat and I were in Belgium a few years ago, we stayed with Chris at his best friend Laurent's place. Mago is Laurent's cousin.
We got up to Whistler at about 11:00pm or so, and had a few drinks with Pat and his new room-mate Cheryl before hitting the sack. On Thursday we went into town and wandered around a little, before stopping off at the Museum to visit Pat and see him in action at work and maybe catch some lunch at the brew pub. After lunch Chris, Mago and I headed over to Lost Lake for a little sun tanning and hanging out. On Thursday evening we went over to the pub at the Delta hotel for "Club Shred" which is an event for the employees of Whistler Mountain. Apparently you can have $2 taken out of every pay check in exchange for membership in Club Shred which among other things, gives you free drinks once a week at various places around town.
Friday was very mellow, Chris, Mago and Pat when up the mountain to see the sights, and I went into town to visit Meaghan's husband Peter who worked on the IT department at Whistler mountain. Peter showed me around the computers and the network on the mountain and told me how the computers running the lifts operate.
After hanging out with Peter a bit, I headed back to Pat's and hung out with Cheryl all day playing Frisbee and taking it easy.
That night we had a barbecue and quite a few folks showed up to have some drinks and a bite to eat.
The next day we figured we'd go hiking and camping out to some hot springs about 80 or 90 kilometers down a logging road along Lillooet lake. We packed up the Volvo with out gear and hit the road. About 30 miles in is a pretty popular hot spring, which we (perhaps unwisely) skipped by in favor of the more remote hot springs. About another 15 miles in we got a flat, pretty much in the middle of no where. We changed out the flat with the spare, which was also pretty much flat, and Pat and I tried to drive on the half filled spare into Port Douglas which is a small town about 10 miles or so further down the road from where we were. The spare didn't last too long, and the road to Port Douglas was very poor so we turned around and regrouped with Andrew Chris and Mago to form a plan.
After a while, a convey of four trucks came by, and they agreed to take Pat back a ways to a logging camp they had passed about 10 kilometers back where someone might have tools to repair a tire.. Chris, Andrew, Mago and I waited by the car playing Euchre and taking it easy.
About an hour or so later Rob, Yvonne and Pat returned, with out much success at the logging camp. They very kindly agreed to take us along with them to the hot springs we had passed about 15 miles earlier, camp out there, and then take us back to the high way the following day where we could try and get some help with the tire. The hot springs were pretty nice, and we camped out there, and left with Rob and Crew at 10:00am the following day.
We drove into Mt Currie, the nearest town with a gas station to try and find somewhere that would help us fix the tire.. we didn't reach much success in Mt Currie, and Rob agreed to take us into Pemberton to check there. The story was the same in Pemberton, which at least had a tire store, but it was closed on Sundays. From Pemberton Pat and I hitched into Whistler with the two flats, and two guys from Switzerland gave us a lift back to Pat's place where we picked up my car, and called around to find an open place to get new tires.
Some time and $300 later, we got two new tires mounted onto the rims, and headed back up to Lillooet lake, this time in my poor little Honda. We reached the car after some time without really any issues, put on a new tire, and headed back to pickup Andrew, Chris and Mago.
I headed back that night, getting back into Seattle at about 2:15AM having been driving pretty much constantly for the previous 16 hours. Here's the photos:
