I do love where we live, Whistler is just a short drive from home and Squamish roughly halfway in between. Today we took a drive up to the resort community, with a lunch stop in Squamish for the quintessential pairing at Backcountry Brewing.
There was a time, seemingly not that long ago, when Whistler was pretty much a winter destination. Few people visited once the snow was no longer conducive to skiing. We used to come up in May, typically around my birthday, and would bring the mountain bikes along to ride the valley trails. The Village was half the size it is today, and the trails were quiet. You could really barrel around on the bicycles because there were few others to encounter.
The Village sees more visitors in the summer than the winter now, and when the snow recedes the hard core mountain bikers hit the terrain. The bikes are very different now, the riding is very different now. I used to think a helmet and a pair of gloves meant I was being a safe cyclist.
Now riders wear full body armour and motocross helmets.
And I’ve seen them bloodied and broken.
Riding a bicycle is a little different nowadays.
But that’s not why we came here today.
Kirk booked us for a Whistler Tasting Tour (https://www.whistlertastingtours.com)
While we waited for the meeting time to arrive, we enjoyed a glass of wine on the balcony of our hotel room overlooking the Village below. It was an opportunity to play a bit with a new lens that I picked up down in Portland in December and which has been languishing in a drawer since I brought it home. The Lensbaby lenses all have a learning curve, the Sol is no different. A single focal length, and a single aperture, a tilting lens, with two little wavy pieces that flip out to partially obscure the optic…it makes for a strange experience that produces something different, but not unpleasant.
A couple of shots with the more familiar Lensbaby Velvet 28 too.
There is a bit of snow left on the mountain, but it is up high and melting away as the weather warms.
We started in the lobby of the hotel and met our tour guide and two women visiting from Ontario. From there, we made the short walk to the Barefoot Bistro where we descended into a wine cellar below the restaurant and had a conversation with (and a few lessons from) the restaurant’s sommelier. The wine cellar is home to close to 15,000 bottles of wine, the most expensive of which is valued at around $22,000!
Who buys that?!?
We also learned the history and art of sabering a bottle of Champagne….and then we were invited to pick a volunteer from our group to use a sabre to open a bottle. We were all quiet for a bit….and the sommelier caught my eye, so I stepped up and took off the top of a bottle with a small sabre.
Full disclosure….it was kinda cool!
We enjoyed a glass of the bubbly and an amuse bouche brought down to us from the restaurant above, and chatted among ourselves before moving on for course number two.
The next stop was Hy’s, where we enjoyed an appetizer with a wine pairing and learned a little bit more about our tour companions.
Like the fact that Kirk and one of the two women were born in the same little town in Ontario. A place that had a population of only around 20,000 back then. Kirk had never met anyone else born there…at least who he didn’t know when he lived there (obviously!). Proof positive that the world really is a small place.
Sidebar, on that topic….yesterday I was in a department store buying socks and when the woman at the register put the sale through, she asked if I had a points account with the store (Yes) and when I gave her my number and she pulled up my file she stared at the computer for a moment before asking me if I knew a Rae Ackerman…. Yes, I said, he’s my uncle….how do “you” know him, he lives in Montreal….? She proceeded to tell me that she is on an arts board with him. And, one more sidebar…last weekend when we were in John Fluevog and I was trying on shoes for a friend, A fellow was trying on a pair of shoes that Kirk wanted but the store did not have in his size…Kirk commented on how great the pair was and they had a little conversation, during which he said where he worked and Kirk asked if he knew our friend Stefan….Yes….How did we know him? Oh, we used to hang out in a nightclub back in PG where Stef was the DJ. Small, small, world….
But I digress….
Next up….the main course, at Quattro. A fabulous piece of salmon on a bed of seafood risotto paired with a delicious red wine…and more conversation.
And, finally….over to Caramba for a dessert of tiramisu paired with a thick and heady ice wine…..and more conversation.
Tourists come here and visit places we take for granted, and we have a tendency to not partake of the tours that they take. I think we forget that there are things to see and learn around and about the places that we call home and so sometimes we are the ones who only experience the surface of what we could. And, ironically, it’s not uncommon to discover new things about your own home when you make the effort to see it through the eyes of a visitor.
And, to round it out…a walk back to the hotel and a relaxing soak in the hot tub to try to work the knot out of my back that has been jamming up my neck the past wo days int he most agonizing way.
It was a good day.