Jan 8 - in Whistler

Yes, we're here. We got in late -- we arrived a little after 1am. Our skis did not make the same flight as us (why ? we checked-in almost 2 hours before flight time) ... anyway, we took a chance and waited for the next flight which was due an hour later and were in luck. AC would have delivered them to Whistler but we wouldn't have known for sure that they'd arrived until the phone rang at 4am.

Our flight was almost on time but by the time we waited until all the baggage was out including the oversized items, and some stragglers, queued up and were served at the baggage counter, got the rental car, bought some wine at the in-airport liquor store, had some coffee ... the 2 hour time difference between flights disappeared. Vancouver airport is great in that the car rentals are on-premises, actually just across from Arrivals, so we could rent the car, stow our luggage, lock the car, and come back later.

The road was great, from a weather perspective and not-so-great, from a construction perspective. There's still a lot of work being done to prep for the Winter Olympics in 2010.

The aircraft was a newly configured Airbus with the business-class seats diagonally laid out like individual pods. In Economy our touch-screen seatbacks had a choice of TV, movies, etc. but I simply set mine to show the flight progress across the country, listened to my IPOD and read my book. These were seats purchased with points transferred from Amex and somewhere along the way we got bumped from our seat selection of Window/Aisle and ended up in the middle of the 4 seats in the 2-4-2 configuration. We had bought some excellent gourmet sandwiches in the airport to bring with us so we ate well. We bought three -- one each plus one to split -- I ate my 1.5 on the flight and Sandy saved her 1/2 sandwich until after the flight.

It's 6:38 local time now ... I have not yet checked the ski conditions for the day. I'll do that in a minute and will also head over to the 24-hour deli very close to here to pick up milk and stuff for our lunch. Sandy's still sleeping. We'll hit the slopes close to 9am, which is opening time.

This place has "free" internet connectivity and luckily I had my CAT5 cable with me. Without the CAT5 cable I'd have had to use the local wireless connection and buy some time. My "account" was still active from the last time we were here, which was two years ago, I think. Last year we had a place in the Village; this year we're back at Creekside.

That's it for now ... Sandy just got up ... much to do.