Vancouver and Whistler

The last stop on our trip was the city of Vancouver, British Columbia and nearby Whistler ski resort. We really enjoyed the city, which has a very cosmopolitan feel but also has great parks, waterways, and beautiful mountain backdrop.

Vancouver also ended up being a great stop for Sarah, who was sad to be missing the cherry blossoms blooming in DC. It turns out Vancouver has 36,000 cherry blossom trees of their own and they were just starting to bloom.

On our way out of town we visit a salmon hatchery. Apparently we've messed up nature so badly we now need to raise baby salmon in tanks before releasing them in the wild to ensure enough will reach adulthood to maintain the population.

We also stopped by this awesome suspension bridge. The first one was made in the 19th century out of hemp ropes. Fortunately this one had steel wires and concrete ballasts.

This was the first time we have skied together and unbeknownst to us we have matching ski jackets. Needless to say we were a bit embarrassed and felt obligated to explain to the people that commented on it that we bought the jackets before we even met each other (but what a tangible sign of our compatibility)!

Whistler just completed this gondola in December that connects the mountain's peak to that of adjacent Blackcomb Mountain. It's quite an impressive piece of engineering. At one point the gondola is 1450 feet above the valley below - that's 200 taller than the Empire State Building. Two of the cars have glass bottoms but we didn't want to wait to ride in one. Here's a photo to give you some sense of how high the gondola is.

A few more ski pictures:

Unfortunately we now need to board our flight back home. We still have a few more posts up our sleeve (including some cool videos we took but didn't have the bandwidth to upload) so keep checking the blog! Can't wait to catch up with all of you.