Ski Resort Series: Stevens Pass

March 1, 2023February 17, 2023 / Maria / Leave a comment

If you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might recall that every year my friends go on a big long weekend ski trip to one of the local resorts. To date we’ve been to Big White, Sun Peaks, Silver Star, Apex, and Mount Washington. But even though we go every year, unsurprisingly we missed a few due to covid over the past few years. We’ve been really keen to resurrect the trip, but it is a lot of planning and Karen and Grant have since moved back to Newfoundland, so it was hard to find the inspiration.

I was convinced to buy the 5 day pass for Whistler this year because it was really good value. I knew it would be a struggle to use all the days, so a bit of research revealed that we can use the pass across the border at Stevens Pass in Washington! I’d never even heard of this mountain before, but it turns out it’s the place to ski if you’re in Seattle, so we decided to make a long weekend of it and drive 3 hours down for a few days. We downsized the trip for ease of planning, but there were still 8 of us that headed across the border on Friday for the weekend in late January.

It’s not that far of a drive, but it can definitely chew up a chunk of time. Me and Seth crossed at truck crossing and didn’t have too much trouble, but Megan and Nick crossed at Peace Arch and ended up stuck at the border for over 2 hours. Then we had to make a grocery stop at Trader Joes (which was a lot of fun I admit) since bringing groceries across the border is complicated. Then finally, we hit traffic coming from Seattle on the way into the mountains. So it ended up taking most of us between 4-6 hours, depending on our success at the border. So I wouldn’t recommend it for a day trip.

We booked an AirBnB in Index, which is about 30 minutes before the ski resort. It was a gated community, so it made for a very confusing turn-off in the dark, but was a beautiful house right on the river. We had a fully stocked kitchen, fireplace, and 4 bedrooms. We decided to take Sadie with us, which ended up actually being a lot less nerve-wracking than I expected. I thought it would be hard to cross the border with her, but none of the border agents really had any interest in her and no one asked to see her vaccination record (which is required to cross).

We had a fun first night celebrating the lunar new year with bai tai’s and raclette and playing the AirBnB’s old school nintendo! On Saturday we drove out to the ski resort and had a full day to explore the runs. A word of warning, visiting Stevens Pass definitely requires some pre-planning and coordination if you want to be successful. They do sell out of passes (one friend ended up bailing on the trip when passes sold out), so make sure to get them in advance if you want to be guaranteed to be able to ski. Fortunately half of us were using our Whistler passes, so all we had to do was show up.

Parking was also a challenge though. I drove up with Brandon and he pretty much got the last spot in the main lot on Saturday. Carolyn and Steve had to park further down the highway and take a shuttle to the resort. What’s worse though is that Carolyn and Steve tried to go back again on Sunday (they were the only ones) and by the time they arrived, there wasn’t actually any parking available and they were forced to take a refund on their lift passes and leave. So even if you do buy the lift ticket in advance, you could still drive up there and get turned away, so go early!

The weather was a bit touch and go. It was lovely when we arrived and the sun was shining, but the mountain got caught up in a cloud for most of the day and the snow kept coming and going. That said, it’s a nice little mountain. I was expecting long line ups because of the parking situation, but the mountain never felt crowded. There’s one lift (Hogsback Express) that’s a bit more popular than the others and has longer lines, but for the most part we didn’t have to wait too long. Plus, the resort is open until 10pm, so there’s lots of time to get your runs in.

We started the day on Skyline Express and gradually explored as many of the lifts as possible. We didn’t bother with 7th Heaven, which was stuck in the clouds and was all double blacks, but we hit almost all the others. I did like Hogsback Express, but Tye Mill and the back side of the mountain were probably my favourite. There’s a few nice runs right along the Tye Mill lift, but the backside was really the best runs. There’s a lot of terrain to explore back there and very limited people. We skied down the transmission line first and then went exploring some of the other runs. The backside isn’t open very late though, so I’d recommend going there early. We got hungry after a few runs over there and left for lunch and then it was closed when we returned.

Brooks Express has a few nice runs as well and we finished the day with one run on Kehr’s Chair. One run on this one was enough for me as it’s pretty much the most terrifying chairlift I’ve ever been on! It’s a two seater chair, but it doesn’t have a safety bar and has really low side rails, so I was basically clinging on to the bar in the middle of the chair for dear life. Great for thrills seekers, but I wouldn’t take a child on it!

Seth couldn’t join me for skiing because we didn’t want to leave Sadie alone at the AirBnB, so him and Lien ended up taking her snowshoeing. We all stayed in for supper and spent the rest of the evening playing some games and learning to line dance. Yes, you read that right. Megan and Nick are getting married in Alberta this summer and they’re determined to get the party started at the reception with group line dancing, so every time I see Megan these days she teaches me a new line dance and we got some really quality instruction on the trip.

Sunday was pretty low key. We slept in and packed up before slowly making our way back home. Me and Seth stopped in Fairhaven and visited the beach with Sadie for lunch, but it was very windy and cold, so it was pretty short lived. Megan told me about an awesome bookstore called Village Books, so I made a quick visit there, but couldn’t give it the full attention it deserved because of Sadie.

We decided to cross in Aldergrove to avoid border traffic at Peace Arch and crossed the border in less than 5 minutes. So it was a much faster drive home and we had plenty of time to decompress from the trip. It’s the shortest ski trip we’ve done (we’ve always go for 3 nights and this was the first time we only did 2), but it was also more low key and easier to plan than previous trips. I would have loved to ski the second day, but mostly it was nice to get away with friends and re-visit some of the magic of pre-covid times. I would definitely return!

Trip to Los Angeles

February 15, 2023 / Maria / Leave a comment

I didn’t get up to very much hiking during the Fall last year, but I was still busy having other kinds of adventures! I’ve never been to Los Angeles and this is probably one of the most spontaneous trips I’ve gone on since I lived in Europe a decade ago. It seemed like everyone on social media was seeing Harry Styles in concert and less than a month before the trip, I impulsively decided that I wanted to go see Harry in concert too. A quick google search revealed he would be in Los Angeles, which is near enough to Vancouver without being too far away for a weekend.

I sent Carolyn a quick text message and we had the following exchange:

Mar: I’m thinking of going to LA to see Harry Styles in November, you interested?

Car: Oooo, I’ve never been there and that sounds fun, but I need to sleep on it.

(9 minutes later)

Car: Forget it, I’m in!

She came to my house a few days later and we booked the flights and concert tickets.

We both used points for the flight, so it was pretty reasonable and we flew direct both ways. The concert was a good deal more expensive than the flights, so we decided to re-visit our younger years and stay in a hostel to save money. I’m definitely past my hostel days and prefer a quiet room to myself, but the accommodations in LA are outrageously expensive and Carolyn got it in her head that we should stay in Santa Monica (pretty much the most expensive). So we scrimped on the hostel so that we could stay in Santa Monica and spend the money on ubers instead. It was mild torture being hungover in a communal space on Sunday morning, but I didn’t regret it too much. YOLO.

Similar to when I went to Vegas, I didn’t expect to like the city, but ended up actually having a really good time! LA is a big city known for its urban sprawl and lack of transit, but it was so much friendlier than I was expecting. It felt a lot less grimy than when I recently re-visited Portland and I actually felt pretty safe as the people were quite nice. California and the PNW in general are known for being a bit more liberal and I definitely found this to be the case in LA. Plus the weather rocks!

It was around 20 degrees celsius when we visited, which appeared cold to a lot of the locals judging by their choice of dress (puffy jackets!), but it was nice and balmy to us and we wore shorts all weekend. We were treated to sun throughout the entire trip and it was lovely to take a break from Vancouver’s monotonous rain and clouds in the middle of Fall.

We left after work on Friday evening and got to LA late on Friday night. Neither of us had a working American cell phone (or even a roaming data plan), but we managed to find enough wifi throughout the trip to call ourselves ubers whenever we needed them. After a confusing departure from the airport, we arrived to the hostel in Santa Monica in time to go to bed. Sadly our companions were up at the crack of dawn, so being early risers ourselves, we made a reasonably early start on the day. We saved even more money at the hostel’s breakfast bar before flushing it all down the drain trying to purchase bus tickets. In our defense, the machine overcharged us and we ended up with a handful of extra passes.

We took the bus into West Hollywood, which ended up being our only bus ride of the trip. You can take two hikers out of the woods, but you can’t make them stop walking. We ended up logging more than 10km walking around the city on Saturday. Carolyn humoured me with a visit to two bookstores right at the start and they were both amazing! The first was Book Soup, which is an independent bookstore with a fantastic collection and actual ladders on the walls. Then we hopped around the corner to Mystery Pier Books, which is a specialty store that just sells first editions of books! It was pretty incredible; it had all these old editions of books, but I’m not sure how much they actually sell because they’re all so special. I thought they should charge $5 to get in the store because you get a lot of busy bodies like us (okay me) who are enthralled with the concept, but unsurprisingly purchase nothing.

So after that obvious highlight of the trip, we spent the rest of the day walking around Hollywood. We started on Sunset Blvd, where we had lunch, before eventually transitioning up to Hollywood Blvd to do the Walk of Fame. I visited 3 Targets trying to find Taylor Swift’s special Midnights album for Emily to no avail. Once we had our fill of cupcakes on the Walk of Fame, we walked around some more looking for wifi to call an uber to the Royal Observatory in Griffiths Park. This involved running back and forth across the street a few times to get the best network, but we made it work!

It was so worth it! It was crazy busy at Griffith Park, but I loved everything about the observatory. From the cool architecture, to the science museum, to the view of the Hollywood Sign. It’s a desert right in the middle of the city. We debated calling an uber back when we were done, but ended up deciding to hike down through the park instead. It got us away from the crowded road, but we didn’t really have enough time to wait for the bus, so we still ended up having to call an uber to take us the lengthy distance back to Santa Monica.

Once back at the hostel, we quickly got ready for Harry Styles while picking a restaurant to eat before the show. We were literally getting ready to leave when I got a text from Emily telling me that Harry had cancelled the show! We knew it was a possibility because he had cancelled the previous night’s show, but he had given more than just an hour’s notice when he cancelled the previous show, so we’d been optimistic our concert would happen. But alas, it was not meant to be. It was pretty disappointing because neither of us was interested in coming back for a concert that would be re-scheduled mid-week in January, so we decided to make the best of it and went out in our concert apparel instead! We were able to get our money back for the show, so our logic was that we now had a pretty hefty entertainment budget for the evening.

We started at Onyx Rooftop Bar in Santa Monica where we ordered fancy cocktails to enjoy outside on the roof. It sounded like a swanky idea, except for the little issue where we were the only people who actually found it warm enough to be on the roof. But instead of crying over our $35 drinks, we befriended the only other people on the roof and got some club recommendations for later.

We left the rooftop in search of cheaper drinks and decided on a Mexican restaurant, only to accidentally go into the wrong building and end up eating at a much less exciting grill. Unsurprisingly, neither of us noticed until we were halfway through our entrees and started commenting on the lack of tacos on the menu. It was too late to remedy the situation, so we decided to go next door to the Cantina for a drink afterwards instead. Our Harry Styles shirts were a big hit among the street crowds and our bartender took pity on us a treated us to a round. After that, it was time to finally find some dancing.

If you ever travel with me, the first thing you’ll learn is that while I extensively research all the natural attractions I want to visit, I don’t care a toss about restaurants and clubs. I like to eat good food and have fun, but I’m just as happy to wonder into some hole in the wall restaurant as a fancy one. Our young and hip friends from the Onyx had advised us about a hot club called The Bungalow, but we opted for a Google find first called Harvelle’s. It was only $10 (and no line) to get in and we ended up loving it! It’s a small little jazz bar with live music. It doesn’t attract the young and hip crowd, but we had a great time dancing to the live music and having enough space to actually walk around.

That was a real contrast to The Bungalow. We had to wait in line to get in and once we did, it was wall-to-wall people. It was definitely a party with a massive dance floor and DJ, but it was very chaotic and we ended up chatting up some new friends rather than get trampled on the dance floor. If you’re 23 and in LA for the first time, it’s definitely the place to be, but we’re 30 now (lol), so we’d give the edge to the jazz bar!

We slept in as much as possible the next day, but eventually packed up to explore Santa Monica. We’d only brought a small carry-on backpack with us, so we carried our stuff around with us on Sunday. We got coffee and pastries from a cute coffee shop nearby and started the day with a visit to the pier. It’s pretty cool, but neither of us was in the mood for rides, so we ended up walking the beach instead. We walked more than 7km on Sunday and stopped about halfway between Santa Monica and Venice (Oceanview Park) to search out a restaurant for lunch.

We stumbled upon a farmers market and Carolyn humoured me with visiting a few more bookstores. Venice Beach had a different vibe than Santa Monica for sure, but it was still a pretty neat place. We checked out the canals and then spent the rest of the afternoon lounging on the beach eating fruit before heading back to the airport for our return flight. So overall it was a very whirlwind trip – less than 48 hours in total – but I still feel like we got to see a bunch of things. We stuck to the most basic of attractions, but still caught a little bit of the flavour of the place. We made lots of friends while out partying, which really cemented LA as a much friendlier city than anticipated. I would visit again, but I’m not really in a rush. Maybe the next time Harry Styles plays the Kia Forum we’ll make a second attempt with better results. Fortunately neither of us are superfans, so the trip was far from ruined!

A Day in Portland

August 3, 2022August 2, 2022 / Maria / 2 Comments

After a great day at Cannon Beach we made our way to Portland. We didn’t have a lot on our agenda except for a bit of shopping, but it ended up taking up the entire day. We started with brunch at Mother’s Bistro, which was both fancy and delicious, before spending 2 hours a piece at Powell’s Bookstore and REI. I’m a huge bookworm (I actually have a second blog where I write book review if you want to check it out – The Paperback Princess), so I was super enthused to visit Powell’s. It was my second time and if possible, it was even bigger than I remembered. I spent the bulk of my time in the front of the store where all the sales and featured books were, and a little bit of time browsing the used books. I never even made it to the third floor.

The two things I love most about bookstores are learning about new reads that I wouldn’t have discovered otherwise, and browsing used books for good deals. I got to do both at Powell’s! I made a few impulses purchases of books that I thought sounded good or were featured, and found a few used books that I’ve been looking for. I don’t think I actually paid full price for anything and walked away with 6 books.

As for REI, it is a very popular outdoor store, basically the US version of MEC. Despite how popular it is, I’d actually never been, so I was excited to finally visit, especially since they had lots of 4th of July deals on. Unfortunately I didn’t really find any deals, but I did get a cute fanny pack and a new pair of shorts that I really like. Lien and Brandon got a few knick knacks as well and the afternoon pretty much got away from us and we finally checked into our hotel.

The bulk of our evening was dedicated to going on a little bit of a brewery crawl, which I love doing in Vancouver and most recently did in Calgary. We hit up a few popular breweries (Deschutes and Von Ebert’s), but the beer went to my head pretty fast. Well, at the time I blamed the beer for a bit of a headache, but I later learned it was the first symptom of covid presenting (boo!). So we cut the tour a little short and went in search of some sweet treats instead, with me and Lien getting cookies and Brandon, ice cream.

The real highlight of the trip though was a ghost tour that Brandon had found and signed us up for! It went around old town Portland and introduced us to its very sordid history. Due to its location near the Pacific and its status as a “port city”, Portland was a hotbed for human trafficking. The city has a very extensive tunnel system that runs throughout the entire old town and was used to smuggle men in and out of the town into a life of slavery aboard the ships running to China. They would be lured into the bars and once they were drunk, dropped into the tunnels and forced servitude. As a result, Portland has gained a new status as one of the most haunted cities in the world.

The tour was fascinating. We had a great tour guide and I loved that we learned so much actual history on top of the ghost stories. I did a walking tour when I visited Portland back in 2014, but it was entirely above-ground and focused on Portland’s more reputable history. I liked the ghost tour because I learned about whole other side of Portland that I knew nothing about.

The following day we had to head back to Vancouver, but first we decided to check out some of Portland’s most reputable waterfalls: Moltnomah and Wahkeena Falls. If you live in the PNW, you’ve probably already seen them both on instagram and I’m embarrassed to say, I was yet another tourist adding to the masses. My problem was that I didn’t do my research, something rare for me. We drove out the Columbia River only to discover that you need a day pass to visit the falls. The park rangers advised us we could visit Bridal Veil Falls instead, and not wanting the drive to be a total waste, we decided to do that.

Fortunately, Bridal Veil Falls was lovely and I really don’t feel like I missed out on anything. It’s a short walk to the waterfall and there’s a side walk with gorgeous views of Columbia gorge. We had stopped by a pastry shop on the way out of town for breakfast and picked up some delicious treats, which we ate while enjoying the view. It was a quick stop, but it was perfect for us because we still had 5 hours of driving to get back home.

Unfortunately for us, we had quite a long wait at the border and Brandon cursed both me and Lien for not having Nexus. In fact, the wait was so long that I had enough time to apply for Nexus while waiting. But overall, it was a really fun trip across the border. Portland is a bit of a far drive with the border crossing, but I was glad to finally visit after 8 years of hoping to return!