Easter Weekend in Vancouver

The kennel was booked solid this weekend, so we were unable to follow through on our original plan, which was to head to the dog-unfriendly Tetrahedron Provinicial Park to snowshoe for Easter weekend, so we bummed around the Vancouver area instead. It actually worked out for the best because I was able to pick up a shift at the hospital and work 4.75 hours of overtime at ridiculous pay. Remi was also able to get the same days off this weekend as I had, which was counter-productive school work-wise but gave us some great family time :)

Anyway, our weekend consisted of a hike on Friday where we got so ridiculously lost that we came NOWHERE near our destination - which, I might add, was only 6 km from the trailhead. This snowshoe was at Rainbow Lake near Whistler and all of the trail markers were below the snow-line. We actually ran into two other snowshoers (who were heading up for some winter camping) who had GPS, a topographical map AND had been there before and THEY couldn't even find the trail! The odds were against us and after trying to scale a mountain (heading in exactly the opposite direction that we were supposed to go) we headed back to the car. The good news is the weather was nice and we got some great photos.

Saturday both Remi and I worked, which was no fun and we have no pictures of that.

Sunday we spent the day at home, basically. Nothing was open, so we took time to do a lot of nothing. That's also the day we made our Easter dinner. I made a chicken with apple stuffing on a bed of apples and it was not very good. I don't blame myself or the recipe, I blame the chicken. A lot of chefs suggest doing a salt brining before cooking to bring out the flavour of the chicken - does anyone have any feedback on that? Anyway, we took the opportunity to drink a bottle of wine and some liquour with dessert ;) Remi and I actually switched roles and I made dinner and he made dessert, which was a delicious berry and mascarpone-filled puff pastry thingy with an attempt at merignue on top.

Monday was another hike day. This time, because of weather, we stayed below the snow-line. We actually went quite close to Vancouver along the Sea-to-Sky highway up Deeks' Bluff. We got lost on this hike too! It was just not in the cards for us to finish a hike this weekend. This one was impossible due to all the deadfall from the giant storms we had last winter. After bush-wacking and marking our own trail with flagging tape (which is just barely safe) we had to turn back. THEN we tried another trail and that one ended abruptly with flagging tape from other hikers in all directions, which was obviously no help to us in finding the right trail. But Maggie had a blast and ran around like a chicken with her head cut off and we only ran into two other girls on the whole hike. As you probably know by now, few people equals a successful hike for Sarah and Remi. I would be remiss in neglecting to mention that the trailhead was near impossible to find due to the construction on the highway and that we weren't able to do one of the hikes we'd considered because the construction workers were using a provincial park parking lot for their own personal use!! Again, the Olympics ruin part of my life.

(I don't know if I've mentioned this before, but the Olympics also ruined part of my life last year due to the new Skytrain line construction crossing my commute to school and adding close to 20 minutes to the total commute time. This is over now.)

On Monday we also picked up my new glasses!!! (which I'm obviously very excited about) and bought some new fish for our big tank (2 of them have died already - Big Al's is starting to become very Petcetera-esque!) and a new beta for the terrarium (which we have replanted with herbs).

PHEW! So that's a big update for us right now. No other news as far as I know. Three more weeks of school left!!

We hope this finds you all well!!

Sarah