Life of Jelly Jube: Worst day in Whistler... ever!!!

Day 30 (a day late)

This blog is being written and posted late... because I have just gotten home from my whirlwind weekend.

Last Friday, Bobby and I both had the day off so I booked a viewing of a potential wedding venue. We checked it out at 10am (we wanted to see what the place looked like in the daytime for wedding photo potentials). We were at the venue for about 30 minutes.. then we went home to load the car up for our Whistler weekend.

Fast forward to the weekend. 32cm of new snow on Whistler overnight between Saturday night and Sunday morning... which meant that EVERYONE and their entire families headed up the mountain for powder and sunshine. It was INSANE. We had to check out of our hotel before 11am so we checked out before Bobby hit the slopes (I was in so much pain from snowboard camp I skipped Day 2) and the lift lines around 10am was already over an hour long. Anyway, Bobby met up with me around 4pm... and at that point it started to snow... HARD. We hurried back to the car to join the traffic line up to get out of Whistler... We were parked in the day lots at Whistler Village and it seriously took about an hour just to get back on to the Sea to Sky Highway (normally, this drive would be about 5 minutes with no traffic). Ughhh... All of the cars then all started to drive south back towards the city... it was snowing SOOO HARD so we were going really slow (except for the few assholes who thought it was still perfectly safe to drive really fast). It took us over 3 hours to get from Whistler Village to a point halfway between Whistler and Squamish (this drive would normally be about 30-45 minutes). When we got to the halfway point, traffic was at a standstill. No one was moving at all. We were listening to the news on the radio and there was a 6 car pileup ahead of us therefore preventing all of us from going home. My initial plan before hearing this was to drive to Squamish and spend the night. The Garibaldi Highlands area was expecting 5-10 cm that evening and an additional 5 cm overnight. It was not safe to drive that night, even if you had snow or chained tires. However, after one hour of sitting in the car, we decided to just head back to Whistler. There was no point in waiting for the traffic to be cleared because the weather was still really crappy. So we drove back north on the Sea to Sky. It took about an hour to get to Whistler. On the way back, I booked us a hotel online.. we pulled up into the hotel... and apparently we were incorrectly booked because they were sold out for the night.. As were the next 8 hotels we called for a room.... UGHHHH super stressed now. We finally got a room at the Sundial for the price of 840$. We had the sweetest room in the hotel but I was so annoyed about being forced to spend the night that I did not care. We got to the hotel around 9:30. We had dinner around 10pm.. then we were back in the hotel around 11. Bobby enjoyed the hot tub we had on our roof top patio but I was too busy sulking about the day's events indoors by one of our two fireplaces.

I woke up at 5:30 am this morning.. checked the road conditions online... woke Bobby up around 6am, headed to the Starbucks at the Village as soon as it opened (6:30am), got us some caffeine while Bobby checked out and loaded our car, then we left Whistler around 7am. I had to work today and I felt bad calling in sick because there were so many people booked off today. At the end of the day, I could have called in sick due to the circumstance, but either way, I just wanted to get the hell out of Whistler because it was STILL snowing there as we were leaving and I refused to have to be forced to stay another night!

We made good time on the drive back. There were only a few cars on the road, minimal traffic on the Lion's Gate Bridge and downtown and Bobby dropped me off at work. I got to work at 8:50am (only 20 minutes late). I have never been so happy to get to work ;)