If you’re in Vancouver and you’ve got a spare couple of days in the summer going into autumn what can you do?
Looking at the map, the Rockies are close and so is Whistler.
So we hired a Rent-a-wreck car and got on the road.
The road took us out the top end of Vancouver past Stanley Park and over the Lions Gate Bridge leaving downtown behind.
Then skirting along the edge of the bay round to Horseshoe Bay.
A few quick stops to photo the Sounds with the Rockies ahead.
We drove about 50km along the side of Howe Sound. Across the water several islands: Bowen and Gambier islands the largest. Then further on Anvil Island.
The sound got narrower, ending at Squamish. We didn’t stop though, Whistler was our mission.
Then into the mountains, with Mt Garibaldi on the right and a bit further on the town of Garibaldi. Again we didn’t stop.
The mountains are big, severe looking and some of them had a lot of snow on. We thought about how we could get up into them.
Arriving at Whistler we found some cheap digs and went out to a bar. The ski season hadn’t started, but there were some pre season workers in the bar. They told us there was a rave going to be happening a few miles away in the forest.
We figured out which road and set out to hitch there. Hitching at the time was still a thing in the UK. Much less in the US. Canada, we weren’t sure about.
But eventually a Volkswagen Combi pulled over. He said he was surprised to see us hitching. Seems it wasn’t much of a thing there either. Turned out he was the DJ for the rave.
The rave was drink-less. Very surprising to two Brits and after a while we found a lift back to town. Not the best rave.
We’d hoped to get up into the mountains, maybe do a bit of hiking around, but the ski lifts weren’t running and we couldn’t get up there without a very long hike. So we gave up on that idea and drove further up the valley to a lake, saw more mountains and snow and headed back.
There wasn’t a whole lot going on in Whistler out of season, and with our curiosity satisfied after a couple of days, we got back in our Rent-a-Wreck and headed back to Vancouver. The Rent-a-Wreck performed well, and though it was an old car gave us no issues and we handed it back quite satisfied.
