14th Day - Whistler

April 21, 2023

The day started more or less with our last 'Canadian' breakfast. Tomorrow we'll have coffee and toast in our suite before we leave for Vancouver, and the day after tomorrow we'll probably have breakfast in the business lounge at the airport. The farewell is approaching relentlessly.

After yesterday's completely overcast weather here in Whistler, where you could only guess the mountains all around, today the weather was much friendlier and you could see the beauty of the Whistler and Blackcomb mountains in all their glory. At least in the morning. This ski resort is unique. There are over 200 different ski runs and 27 gondola lifts.

We took advantage of the good weather and went to the frozen, idyllic "Lost Lake" after breakfast, which we walked around on foot. A very beautiful walk, mostly through snow ❄️.

After a little siesta, we went to the "Sqamish Li'wat Culture Centre", a kind of museum and art exhibition of the local First Nation (or as we old Karl May readers say, the local Indians).

Indians and their history and culture are rightly a big topic here and omnipresent. After all, Vancouver, Whistler, and the whole region are located on the former land of the Sqamish and the Li'wat. Even the city names are written in the signs in Indian, which is impossible to read and even more impossible to pronounce.

Because we wanted to get a Whistler Starbucks mug, we then made our way to the Center Village, where we walked around for at least half an hour before we found the Starbucks branch.

To say it again, Whistler is a very charming place, very touristy, but still managed to remain original and you can feel very comfortable here. To Brigitte's regret, however, the "Peak to Peak" gondola lift, which connects the two largest ski resorts horizontally, was closed here.

In the evening, after a very mediocre dinner in a kind of sports bar around the corner, we had a very nice encounter with a local named Terrance. And this is how it went: We were on our way back to the hotel when we saw a Jeep in a parking lot with a large Harley sign on the hood. And it was exactly the Harley shop we had visited in Vancouver. But that wasn't the special thing about the Jeep, because there was a huge, real moose antler with a skull hanging in front of the radiator (in Germany, it would have been immediately taken off the road by the police).

We immediately took a photo, when a guy in camouflage shorts and with a long beard, holding a pizza in one hand and a coke in the other hand, approached us from the right. I immediately said to Brigitte, 'That guy owns the car.' And that's exactly how it was. We immediately started talking about the Harley story, he was immediately thrilled with us and turned out to be an incredibly nice, open-minded guy who immediately took us to his heart as bike brothers and sisters. He could also speak a few words of German and said that he would come to Germany, to Bad Homburg, every few months (this year in July) and would contact us then. We exchanged email addresses, hugged each other warmly, and he drove back to his domicile in the mountains where he does camps for young people who have come into contact with drugs and the law. In nature, without a computer or mobile phone. A really cool guy, and by the way, he personally killed the moose in front of the Jeep 😎.

Tomorrow we will make our way back to Vancouver on the Sea-to-Sky Highway.