I took three days off this week and joined Vikram and his brother on a trip to Vancouver and Whistler in BC, Canada. Ullas was here too and joined us on the trip. I’d blog in detail about the trip, but Ullas has written up the salient points in his blog. Some trivia about the trip:

1. This was my third trip to Vancouver. I’ve now visited Vancouver once a year for the past three years.
2. The weather sucked. It was cold, windy and rainy for most of the three days we were there. It wasn’t as bad as in Seattle, which had a couple of thunderstorms while we were out, but pretty bad nevertheless.
3. All my trips there have had some connection to the (rather pathetic) movie ‘Fantastic Four’. The first time we were there, in Nov ’04, they were filming the movie a block from our Hotel. The second time we were there, the movie had just been released and we saw this huge flying ad for the movie while we were at Stanley Park. This time, I had the DVD of the movie with me when we were there. I know… lame…
4. Vancouver downtown – especially the area between Gastown and Chinatown – is full of druggies and drunks. Even at 10am! The last time we were there, we walked from Gastown to the Chinese Garden at 6pm and thought it was just because it was after dark that there were so many of them there. This time, we saw drunks on the street at 10 in the morning!
5. Some river near Vancouver was flooded recently leaving the entire city’s drinking water supply polluted. So, restaurants and hotels weren’t serving water anymore. We were glad we carried water, Coke and Capri-Sun with us from the US.

The trip itself was a lot of fun – Whistler was waay above my expectations and I will from now on look down upon every other ski resort, including Snoqualmie, with contempt for not living up to the bar that Whistler has set. We didn’t do as much skiing as would have liked – we started at 1 and were done by around 4.

A few pics in my flickr set.