Highway to death..

I am officially employed, and so is Anna, although not by the resort, by ‘partner’ companies…which give you no benefits at all, but how can I complain I have a job, and I am dam well grateful for it, wages are enough of a benefit for me. I am a hostess/waitress for the Lizard Creek lodge, and I’m hoping that what I make in tips will be able to purchase my ski pass…yes yes I have changed my tune about tipping since I got here...please tip away, the balancing act I shall be performing with food laden plates I now consider worth an extra few dollars, and maybe even a few more dollars after that for my award winning ‘it was such a pleasure serving you’ smile. Anna, with her keen eye to detail and her mother as her apparent role model (as she stated in her interview) managed to get a job in housekeeping, I would normally say that she would be very good at this, but I am looking around our room and its definitely not just my side that’s a little messy….I’m sure she’s scowling as she reads this. Anyway we both have jobs, and Anna started a couple of days ago, because she had started work it meant that she was unable to come on our very exciting road trip to Calgary, to pick up Mill’s other half, Babs. But before I get onto our trip…I will first tell you about the legend of the Griz.

Fernie is well known for its amazing powder, which over the last few days I have experienced as I trudged through the fine snow on my way to and from the flat… as that’s right, the snow is finally here. But what is responsible for this amazing snow, and when it arrives? Air circulation? Altitude? Latitude? No, no, no… a better question is WHO is responsible? Who decides when the sky opens ups and lets powder fall….. The Griz, that’s who.

As legend goes, deep in a cave of a grizzly bear, high up in the mountains of Fernie, a baby boy was born, he was born in the cruel and hostile winter of 1879. Sometime later, the bear awoke, and a battle to the death occurred between the hungry savage bear and the child, but surely the child would have no luck against such a creature? The noise of the battle was heard by the towns people, and the next day they set out to seek the source of the noise, they found nothing, but one man swore he saw a child playing in the snow and rocks, with the skin of a bear draped around him, but no one took his claim seriously and the incident was forgotten. Years later a group of ski-tourists were climbing around what is now the resort area, and when they looked up towards the summit of the mountain they saw the frame of a massive man, shoulder 6ft across, draped in the skin of a grizzly bear and in his hand he held a giant musket, which he shot towards the sky, the more he shot, the more powder fell. This wild bear man, is the Griz… and he is responsible for the snow.

Now this legend is all very well, and I am very excited by the knee deep snow which I can see through my window…but I would have appreciated if the Griz could have held off the snow just one day, because the Griz’s antics very nearly killed us. It is really unfair of me to put all the blame on the Griz, the decision to drive to Calgary in the snow and ice was after all our own.

Milly was always going to go to Calgary to pick up Babs, and what type of awful friend would I be if I made her do the 4 hour journey on her own….and a road trip sounded quite fun. The trip was perfectly timed for me as Fernie does not have a phone shop… and I required one, as on Monday I accidently dropped my phone down the toilet… while it was flushing. Now in English toilets, I’m quite sure that the main issue would be that the phone would have sucked up loads of water, and that it had been at the bottom of a disgusting toilet, but here I didn’t even have a chance to have these concerns, as the crazy powerful flush took my phone away as I just watched in drunken awe, a dead fish couldn’t have disappeared faster. Now if anyone in England would like to test this at home, I would be very interested to find out the results.

Back to our trip to Calgary…we borrowed a friend’s 600 dollar car, obviously equipped with everything we needed… except winters tires, a rear window screen wipers, and oh yeah it had dying headlights, but it would get us from A to B…safely? We prepared ourselves the night before, the roads were clear, the weather was cold…not yet snowy. But overnight, the Griz struck, he shot his musket in the air, and we woke to find everything covered in snow… and it was still falling, this did not deter us though, what’s a little snow? Milly’s driven in snow before, it’s all good. Within the first 10 minutes we had encountered our first hitch…we didn’t know how to put petrol in the car…no not because we are women and incapable of such tasks, but because the car was old school, somewhere in the car was a button which let us open the petrol thing (I say thing because I am one of those girls who doesn’t really know car stuff…but Milly isn’t) so we spent half an hour looking like fools while the petrol pump man watched us fuss around, when the task was finally done, we went to pick up the girls, Kate and Rachel, two English girls who we have been hanging out with. In all honestly the drive on the way wasn’t that bad, we drove past cars that had obviously been abandoned on the sides of the road because of the snow, but we were going okay, the roads were icy, but Milly handled it well, a few sharp stops here and there but we made it to Calgary. We were planning on having a bit of a shopping day while we were in a big city, however our errands seemed to take 3 hours and I achieved nothing apart from getting a new phone and it was time to get Babs.

Of course Milly and Babs had a beautiful reunion, and I’m sure it was made even better by the crowed car of girls who weren’t his girlfriend also greeting him, everyone loves a third, fourth and fifth wheel in romantic moments. With Milly and Babs reunited and loved up, Kate began the long drive home which we soon realised would not be as simple as the drive there, the safety of daylight had disappeared.

The first 45 minutes went well, beside the petrol light flashing for a little longer than we felt comfortable with, so we headed off the highway in hope of finding fuel, which turned out to be easy enough, and we even had a little pit stop at MacDonalds (of course road trip and maccas go hand in hand). We and the car were all fueled up and ready to go, the difficulty came when we were trying to find a way of the 2A and onto the 2 in a homebound direction, in our map muddle, and the on-and-offing of the car lamp we suddenly swerved of the icy road and found ourselves door deep in a snow ditch…with not a chance of getting out. Milly, Babs and I got out of the car, in hope that lightening the load would maybe make it more movable….Rachel… who we hadn’t realised was stuck in the other side of the car without the option to get out, meanwhile merrily carried on with her knitting in the front seat, as if this was a perfectly reasonable situation, although I understand her reasoning, because if you don’t knit.. you can only cry… we were stuck in minus something conditions, surrounded by door deep snow,# 3 and half hours from Fernie….I would have loved some knitting to distract me. A passer-by did stop and attempt to help us lug our car out of the snow but to no avail…matters were then made worse by the Police. PC Grumpy-stiltskin was horrible, flashing his torch in our eyes like we were reckless youths, who clearly must have been speeding, high, or drunk, and not the innocent responsible(ish) young adults that we are. After some questioning on why we were driving a car which wasn’t ours, and if the owner knew we had it, oh and some more torch flashing, he eventually helped find a tow, and informed us that they were backed up for hours so we were likely to be stuck in the freezing cold till then…. Thanks mate. Luckily grumpy was wrong, and a tow arrived within half hour…. This however was long enough for me to start losing feeling in my fingers because of the cold, and then the tow man, to get us out of the way, made us stand in the snow ditch, I initially didn’t mind this as I have recently purchased snow boots for -40 conditions… and this was nowhere near -40, but it seemed standing in the snow ditch for another half hour was too much for my shoes to handle and my feet were become increasingly unhappy, in fact I’m pretty sure my toes had frozen inside my boots and were threatening to snap off. 86 dollars, 50 frozen toes and me getting chucked out of 7/11 for loitering later… we were back on the road, and the snow had started to fall again. As we drove further out of the city, darkness descended more as the street lights got taken away from us, then we saw a light....a flashing light… red and blue in colour….the police…and it was our favourite officer, officer Grumpy-stiltskin, who greeted us with ‘Oh you guys are having a bad night aren’t you, I hope you know what you were doing wrong!?’ Turns out our headlights weren’t even coming on anymore! He left us with instructions to leave full beam on and sent us on our away again. I don’t know if he thought he left us with advice that would improve our journey, because he certainly did not. Driving in complete darkness, with full beam on, and snow falling towards the windscreen, absolutely does not improve visibility, if anything, it causes more panic, because all you can see is snow hurtling towards you and nothing else, Milly’s driving was amazing, and she coped with having our lives in her hands very well, but I can honestly say that I was quite sure I was going to die, it was terrible. Hours passed with us driving at the fastest pace we could manage and not being able to see anything until we decided to stay in a motel, which I never thought I would really experience unless I was married woman having an affair or… a prostitute, it was quite nice though.

The next day we set off again, although our journey hardly improved in the daylight, as dusts of snow meant we could see nothing, but a 360 spin on the highway, and the swerving out of the way of 3 cars coming towards us later… we made it back.. nerves fried, but back and unharmed.

We have been in Fernie for two weeks now, so I should have heaps to write about…but I don’t. The end of October/November are dead months in Fernie. We all had our interviews, Milly successfully got a job at the Lost Boys Café as a waitress/’greek chef’, but Anna and I have still been waiting on our replies…. I unfortunately found out this morning that I was not successful, even though I was definitely VERY charming in my interviews, this basically means goodbye free ski pass, good bye half price rentals and good bye free lessons. This should put in a worse mood than I’m in, but handily having been here two weeks I have collected enough friends in each department at the resort that this will hopefully not end up being the most expensive problem in the world and there is still the chance that I may get a job in housekeeping aka toilet cleaner, the dream job of every university graduate.

Our two weeks here have basically consisted of watching a lot of films, pool, spending far too much money on going out, and desperately seeking jobs. Even though we have guaranteed jobs in Vancouver, desperation is still the word I would use for our job search, because we are most defiantly not leaving Fernie because a. we love it, and b. because the over-confidence we had in our ability to get jobs resulted in us signing a 6 month lease and giving up 800 dollars of our non-existent money for our first month’s rent and security deposit.

I originally though that Fernie would be lacking in many vital attributes required for city folk, but i turns out I don’t need a lot, give me a swimming pool, a couple of bars, an amazing bagel shop and Canadian Tire the all-purpose shop and I’m good to go, oh and not forgetting a supermarket. The supermarket here however does unfortunately, or fortunately, have the unusual ability to make you regret your porky decisions even before you enter… it goes by the name Overwaitea… yes like fatty put down those biscuits before you become over-weighty. Although the supermarket has discouraging name, everywhere else is happy to provide me with an insulating layer be it through Rocky Mountain Beer or through amusingly named bagels e.g ‘please brie mine’; I’m just waiting for the romantic moment where prince charming buys my this bagel as a gesture of his love.

Talking of prince charming… or just men in general, I very embarrassingly got taken away by a Fernie ski season regular while innocently talking to a male friend, and told ‘not jump on the first guy I see’ as the ratio of men to women is 3:1, I believe she mentioned the words ‘sausage-fest’ and with those parting words of wisdom she sent me back to go awkwardly go finish my conversation, with the paranoid feeling that she was watching me, making sure I wasn’t whore-ing myself, and considering herself the guardian angel of promiscuity.

Halloween has also come and gone, and was more successful than our previous attempt to throw ourselves into ghoulish state-of-mind, we crafted, we dressed up, we sung karaoke (badly) and we danced… then I ran-away back to the hostel because ‘I needed a sandwich’.

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Seeing as we are in North America we wanted to embrace their cultures, you know massive pizza, Starbucks and the very important October holiday of Halloween. Walking around Vancouver we were inundated with flyers from costumed theatre groups, for the many, many, month long Halloween events that were happening, there were parties, haunted houses and ghost trains, some of them looked like they could be truly frightening… some not so much. I was very enthused to try out one of these scary delights…my choice, and I will take responsibility for this bad decision, as I do remember the words ‘Come on guys, this will be amazing!’ coming out my mouth, was the Stanley Park Alice in Wonderland Halloween ghost train. We timed our journey to the park so that we would be able to get the last train which was at 9.30, quite an early finish time for a spooky ghost train really...hmmm. Although we did managed to make the train, we had a dramatic journey there, as we think the bus changed numbers and location while we were on it without telling us… that must have been what happened, because there no way we all mistook the number 6 bus for the number 5….yes that must have been what happened. When we finally got there we realised that this haunting, spooky event….was for the under 7’s but with the huge amount of effort it took to get there I was insistent on wasting the 8 dollars the train cost only to realise the error of my ways when the majority of the set was floating ‘scary’ cardboard cut outs, and an actress playing Alice who has a short battle with a dragon…using her trusty lightsaber… must have been the Lewis Carrol-George Lucas Version.

In other news... we also went to Capilano Bridge, “Vancouver’s top tourist attraction”, which is a 450ft suspension bridge. From my childhood memories I remembered the bridge as a death trap made of rope and wood, with huge gaps in so children could fall off, but it seems in the 18 years since being here my memories were greatly exaggerated as it is very sturdy and made of metal...so I was pretty safe, my scary description did however result in a massive anti-climax for Milly.

Then it was time, time for our 18 hour trip to Fernie… woe.