Day 4 - Whistler

Multiple anxiety moments today. Have I really booked the car? Have I booked it for today? Will my cheap and codged sat-nav work? And, of course, the whole driving-on-the-right thing. Some people don't seem to bat an eyelid over this. I've always got my right and left mixed up (and I've always blamed that on being left-handed, but without any evidence), so I have to go through all manner of mental contortions when driving on the wrong side of the road and approaching a junction.

We caught a taxi out to the airport, which was the only place that had any hire cars left by the time I came to book one. We got a less talkative taxi driver than the one who brought us from the airport on our first day, but he did give us one piece of information that was to prove invaluable later on, and that was that they'd built a new two-lane road to Whistler for the 2010 Winter Olympics, to replace the old single-lane one.

He dropped us off at 4440 Cowley Cresent [sic] where, in contrast to last time, our booking was confirmed straight away, and we were outside and looking at our new travelmate within 10 short minutes. In my head I was going to christen him "J", following on from "H" (you don't want "I", too confusing), but he's a Ford Fusion, and Sandra named him "F". F it is.

I plugged the sat-nav in, containing legal software but hacked to run on a Navigo rather than a Tom Tom, and waited to see if it would pick up a signal. First message out - "satnav lost signal 5 seconds ago"... what? And then it displayed a map, and allowed me to key in "Whistler" as a destination. So the software works - Someone tell Bhav, I'll settle up when we get back!

Only one thing left... and that was to start the engine and get driving.

At this point driving - something that I can almost do in my sleep (and, on some Monday mornings, after a long weekend, I often do) - suddenly takes up 95% of the CPU in my brain. No easy introduction here; I'm driving from an airport, to a busy city I don't know, in rush hour, in a car I'm not familiar with, it's an automatic when I'm used to stick-shift, on the wrong side of the road, and with a sat-nav I've not learned to trust yet (the other 5% of my brain is occupied with breathing, circulation, and looking at pretty girls). It's not easy, and I wasn't perfect; F now has one less wheel trim than he had before we picked him up, thanks to a couple of close encounters with kerbs. That'll be a trip to a Ford dealership before we drop him off then.

Still, somehow we managed to navigate to and then out of Vancouver, onto Highway 99, where the sat-nav promptly had a fit. Thankfully I remembered what the taxi-driver had told us - that the old Highway 99 had been replaced by a new and bigger Highway 99 - and I plugged on. Eventually the old and the new roads merged, and we were sorted.

They call the road out of Vancouver to Whistler the Sea to Sky highway, by virtue of the fact that you're driving from the coast and up into the mountains. It's certainly more romantic than just "Highway 99". I suppose if you're coming the other way then it should be the Sky to Sea highway, but it's not.

We arrived in Whistler in the early afternoon, had a quick look around, then sat on the balcony of a pub/restaurant drinking coffee and eating nachos. It was interesting watching people walking past; Whistler seems to draw people who enjoy dressing up in Mountain Bike armour to the point where they look like Imperial Stormtroopers, and snowboarders who like to grow inordinate amounts of hair and wear clothes far too big for them.

After food we walked around Whistler town for a while, then made our way to Lost Lake. There were a number of signs around telling us that we were now in bear country, and once again the bins have those handles that are too small to be opened by bear paws. Whistler's okay, but it's the kind of place you need to go to if you're going to do some sporting activity there, like snowboarding or skiing or mountain biking. In my travel guide for Whistler, of the top ten "Things To Do In Whistler", eight of them are sporting, one is hiking, and the last is bear-watching.

We then drove back to Vancouver, got stuck in a traffic jam for 40 minutes, ate in a lovely Italian restaurant, and now we're packed and ready to move on. Tomorrow we catch a ferry to Vancouver Island. Four days we've stayed in Vancouver, and it's not been enough. There's so much more to see in this city... but if we stayed here we'd miss out on other great stuff. That's the compromise we made.

On the way back this afternoon we drove through a place called Daisy Creek. "Sounds like a polite name for a lady's fanny," I declared. Two minutes later we drove through a place called Furry Creek. Sandra just looked at me. "Okay," I conceded, "you win."