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It was the Relic ski trip this past weekend, and man was it amazing. I can honestly say it was one of the best weekends of my life. Every year, a good portion of the studio goes up to Big White (a ski resort near Kelowna, BC) for a full weekend of skiing. This year, about 25% of the company made it up. This was my first Relic ski trip (and certainly not my last), and I can now see what all the hype was about.

There are a TON of pictures, so you’ll have to click the link below to see.

Friday morning

I finally make it into the office… somehow managing to lug a pair of skis, poles, ski boots, helmet, camera bag, and suitcase to my cubicle. It’s always fun to look around and see who has their stuff because you know they are coming to the trip as well. I proudly positioned my skis next to my desk and watched the clock tick by all day. I managed to get a good amount of work done since I got in very early to make up time. While waiting, the awesome people in my cabin (Dilks, Degnan, Woods, Nutter, Botha, and Dinehart) and I e-mailed back and forth to each other psyching each other up.

All my gear in the office

My new Burton jacket I love it!

Friday afternoon

It’s around 4pm at the office and I can see that a bunch of people are starting to get antsy. I play a quick game of foosball (apparently I had foosball obligations I was not aware of), while wearing my ski jacket, getting rather hot, and then cart my stuff into the elevator with Degnan. We lug it over to the pick up point and get even more excited seeing everyone loading their gear into the bus.

Everyone loading into the bus

Our cabin happens to sit relatively close to each other on the bus and we share a bunch of snacks we brought on the bus. (I brought a huge bag of Smart Food, popcorn that everyone decided to eat large amounts of)… The first few hours of the bus ride are fun ones. We are generally rowdy — I was taking lots of pictures of people on the bus… fortunately I decided not to drink any of the beverages available and got some funny pics of other people. Carota, an Art Director, brought his $5k video camera on the bus and went from row to row taking some footage using only the measly overhead lights in the bus. I can’t wait to see the videos, I bet they are hilarious. Hopefully there was enough light to see somewhat clearly.

I managed to steal Carota’s Jabba the Hut gummy and ate it … it was awesome.

Who knows what Berger is doing :S

We end up making a stopover for food. The bus driver tried to pawn off Burger King coupons to us, but I think most people ended up going to Timmy’s (Tim Horton’s, a donut/coffee chain in Canada), including me. Apparently the chili was a bit off. We decided to take some “hood” pictures, pulling our hoodies up and acting very ghetto. Oh yeah, and Woods ordered this really weird donut that was supposed to be some sort of new cherry version, but it tasted REALLY strange. Like red gummy bears chopped up in dough or something. Beware.

Fun at Tim Hortons…

Friday Evening

The bus ride was starting to feel a bit long. People were getting a little rowdy on the bus… and we ended up turning on the movie “Anchorman”, which generated a host of catchphrases to be used over the weekend. We finally arrived in Big White after a 6 or 7? hour bus ride. It was a crazy winding bus ride up the mountain. I don’t know how, but Dilks and Woods and I somehow managed to sneak into the baggage truck going to our cabins. We drove past everyone walking with their bags on the side of the road. We waited for the rest of our cabin mates to show up (who had the keys of course, haha) and then walked into our cabin/condo. It was amazing! Not fancy, but rustic and much more spacious than I expected. There was a huge open living area, a kitchen, and a dining room. There were a number of rooms with bunk beds or single beds, and a queen in a room at the very top with a bathroom. There were also two other bathrooms. And…. of course… the best part…. a HOT TUB outside on the porch. Awesome! So I settle on taking the pull out couch in the living room area… and get ready for bed, preparing for an early start tomorrow morning (it was after midnight by the time we got settled in the condo). And I see a parade of men going into the hot tub outside… argh! Haha… of course they jumped on my bed a few times making sure to wake me up on their way back to bed >.< Saturday Morning

So after just a few hours of sleep, we woke up bright and early to try to hit the lifts before they opened at 8:30 am. I had brought some breakfast foods with me so I ate those. Dilks made toasted bagels with eggs inside for our group which I think everyone enjoyed. We grabbed our gear and trekked across a snowbank in a direction we THOUGHT was the chairlift. The snow was deep.. occasionally I'd fall in to my thighs. We finally found the edge of the run (the great thing about Big White is you can ski in and ski out from any location on the hill). We strapped on our gear... me and Woods were skiers, and the rest were snowboarders. It was a beautiful, sunny day, but a little bit icy. The runs were groomed so we had to stick to those, avoiding any black runs or runs with too many trees. We skied all morning long... doing the runs as fast as possible. We zoomed by so many people on the hill, I'm surprised we didn't run into anyone or seriously injure any little kids We also tried out the "boarder crossing" which was some sort of little course with some bumps, banked turns, and a little jump at the end. I was so scared I thought I was going to pee my pants, but fortunately somehow made it through dry. Thank goodness I decided to buy myself a helmet for that weekend

Allan cooking breakfast in the morning…

Milling about, getting ready…

Group shot, CABIN FOURTEEN!

Big White!

The gang on the chairlift

What a beautiful site… great day!

Silly Snowboarders take forever to get ready…

Saturday Afternoon

We skied into this little pub on the side of a run called “Raakel’s”. I’ve never been to a ski resort before where you can just ski onto the porch of a restaurant, take off your skis, eat, and then get back on the hill. Not that I’ve been to many ski resorts But it was still great. I ordered chicken fingers and fries, which were decent… the others ordered some beers and food. Service was so. slow. Oh man. After eating we went right back out and continued skiing/snowboarding for the rest of the day. At around 3:30 when the lifts closed we headed down to the Village and hit up the apres-ski appetizers the tour company had set up for us. Everyone went home, showered and changed except for our group, so we were the first ones there. It was fun hearing everyone’s stories as they arrived. Oh yeah, and the tour group should only serve chicken wings. They disappeared first on every platter. After the apres-ski, we headed back to the cabin, showered and changed. The boys jumped into the hot tub again.

Botha’s snowboard modelling shot

More chairlift fun

The group again

Dilks decides to hike up this crazy hill

Most of the Relic folk at the Apres-Ski party

Some hot hot hot tub action

Saturday Evening

We decided to watch the Canucks-Calgary game on CBC. We ordered some chinese food take-out that took about an hour to get ready AND we had to go pick it up ourselves (thanks Degnan and Botha for being so kind!). We also decided to play Cranium (a really fun boardgame that is a mix of charades, pictionary, sculpting, trivia, and spelling etc). It was a bad idea to split the group of 7 into a team of 3 and a team of 4. It got WAY too loud and confusing, haha. But sadly, the other team kicked my team’s ass. Badly. We had made a little game where whichever team won got to choose a team member on the opposing team to do a shot. As the night went on, we realized it was going a bit slowly so we changed it to ALL team member of a team answering incorrectly would have to do a shot. And yup, after we changed those rules, both teams got stuck on a number of Word Worm category questions (spelling, word puzzling). It was fun to say the least

Cranium!

About 3/4 through our Cranium game, a bunch of people from other cabins showed up. I would say we probably had 80% of the Relic people in our cabin at some point in the night. It was great. There were a lot of different drinks available that everyone was partaking in Some memorable moments… wrestling that knocked a sled hanging on the wall off. Doing yoga in the middle of the room. People dancing. Carota filming the hilarity with his video camera. Rock paper scissors competition. Did I mention a dance-off? Oh man.. it was fun. At some point in the night, someone suggested we go to “Snowshoe Sam’s” (or something like that) which was a bar in the Village. For whatever reason, I decided it would be a great idea to wear boots with 4 inch heels. We ended up having to hike up a snowbank (which resulted in me eventually being carried and dragged up by others — Thanks guys!) to get there. When we get inside, Noseworthy runs up to me and yells “THEY HAVE A FOOSBALL TABLE WE HAVE TO PLAY”. So we ended up playing foosball for what seemed like an hour, with random folks, and Relic folks. Even the Executive Producer of the studio joined in! After we won and lost a few times, we decided to head back to the cabin. The walk back was crazy. It was snowing really heavily, and we ended up having to go DOWN a huge snowbank to get to the condo. Degnan and I decided to just throw ourselves down the hill as the fastest way of getting there. I didn’t realize this until the morning, but I lost half the contents of my purse on that hill =/ When we finally got back to the condo, we managed to rouse all our cabin mates and were in the hot tub for an hour or two. It was such a great way to relax the muscles.

Carota taking in the action at the party

The view from the top… I had to be piggy backed around with my impractical shoes

Being pushed over the snow bank… :S

Relaxing in the hot tub

Sunday Morning

We finally went to bed around 3 am, only to be woken up by someone’s cellphone ringing at 6 am. I know it woke up half the cabin! But, at least it got me up and moving a little earlier, so we could have some time to clean the apartment before we made breakfast and hit the slopes. Bishop, one of the guys from the other cabin had lost his shoe in the snowbank that night and miraculously managed to find some of the contents of my purse on the hill! It was so great. We had to pack our bags that morning and move them to the pickup location, so it took us a little longer to get going. We still managed to be skiing by 9:30 am. There was definitely a little bit of smug satisfaction that our cabin partied the most, got the least amount of sleep, and was still one of the first groups on the hill. Now, the snowboarders/skiers in my cabin/group were probably some of the better athletes out there. I was definitely aching all over after our skiing on Saturday, and now skiing all day Sunday just seemed impossible (especially since I had hurt my toe somehow the previous night and couldn’t put pressure on it). But there was fresh powder all over the mountain… it snowed all day, it was deep and soft and amazing… it was totally worth it. On our first chairlift ride up (6 person chair) we made a video on my little digital camera screaming out “FOURTEEN!!!!!!!!!” (our cabin number) much like when Vorenus yells “THIRTEEN!!” after the big gladiator scene in the HBO series ‘Rome’ (Thirteen was the name of his legion in Caesar’s army). On a side note, if you haven’t seen Rome, you should. It’s one of the best TV series airing right now. ANYWAY. So we made that video and then headed up the hill. Wow. It was both beautiful and freezing at the same time. Our clothes got soaked! We headed over to ‘Gem Lake’ today which was a part of the mountain that had really long runs, but lots of fresh powder. We did a bunch of runs in the trees (glade runs) that were really quite challenging. I don’t remember ever pushing myself so hard! I’m glad I had my helmet. We were following Dilks, who was the best of our bunch, through steep terrain with dense trees, little jumps, gullys, and other crazy stuff I don’t think I was quite prepared for. Some of our group got lost a few times and we had to meet at the bottom of the chairlift. It was hard to hear each other through the trees, especially with the snow coming down so hard. Overall, it was the best time I’ve EVER had skiing. Amazing snow, even better people, and tons of fun runs. I felt challenged and I think the others did too. The snow was a bit wet so we decided to head over to the same pub for lunch.

A little tired in the morning

Hot tub rules… uh oh

Even though it was snowing it was still beautiful!

Sunday Afternoon

Lunch was slow as usual. I got a pizza this time, which everyone at my table decided to promptly diss. We got right back on the slopes after lunch. A couple hours later, the snow started coming down really wet and we got soaked through to our clothes. Some weaksauce members of our group (Dilks and Woods!!!! You know what I mean) decided they wanted to call it a day. Since they had our baggage loaded up on trucks on its way to the main lodge at the resort (for pick up by the buses), we didn’t have access to any of our gear. We walked back to the main lodge and sat in the bar inside waiting for the buses to arrive with our gear. Finally they did, and Dilks, Woods and I decided to change into our swimsuits and hit the hotel hot tub while waiting for our coach to pick us up to drive us back to Vancouver. It was such a grand idea. While everyone else was sitting around waiting for the bus, we soaked our tired muscles in the hot tub. Dilks pushed Shawn into the cold pool and then tried to push me in, but fortunately I have ninja moves and hung onto the railings and swung around and ran back to the hot tub. Unfortunately on my way back to the changing rooms I got pelted with very cold snowballs

Dilks thought he found this shortcut through a building instead of walking in the snow… haha… he couldn’t get out so he had to jump out the window.

Whoops

A group enjoying desserts at the restaurant in the main lodge

Sunday Evening

The bus picked us up and it seemed like a long ride back home. We watched movies the whole way back. People seemed to be pretty tired and quiet. We made a couple rest/food stops, and pulled into Vancouver after midnight. I was sad to see the weekend end but happy there were so many great memories!

On our way home we came across a bus in the ditch… our driver pulled over to help them. So scary.

Our bus got tagged sometime over the course of the trip! LOL

Well that’s it… hope you guys enjoyed the long long recap of the weekend

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 8th, 2007 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.