Until this morning, I thought we were going to Grouse Mountain. It turned out that we went to Mount Seymour instead… it appeared that there were some miscommunications (either I didn’t hear properly or I understood wrongly). But it was alright, it doesn’t matter to me since Mount Seymour is supposed to be more competitively priced for basic skiing lessons package.

I woke up at 6+ in the morning, went out at 7. Three hours and three transfers later, we were at Mount Seymour. The view was nice but not spectacular, it’s mostly a mountain built for skiing and snowboarding and nothing much else.

We took up a package that costs $80 per pax for rentals, lift tickets and a lesson. Quite cheap compared to places like Whistler where lift tickets alone cost that much. We also had the bargaining power to lower the rates from $90+ (individual rates) to $80, which was a group rate that supposedly required advanced booking. There were about 15 of us.

Learning how to ski was fun, but tiring because the skis and shoes were heavy and quite difficult to control for a newbie like myself. And it got quite frustrating after a while because I just couldn’t get it right. Hmmm, I guess as I previously thought, I’m probably not very into skiing. I’ll stick to more idiot-proof activities next time like sightseeing tours, rides, etc.

The weather was actually just cloudy in the morning, with a temperature of 3 degrees Celsius. However, as the day went along, it started to snow and got quite heavy by early evening.

We wanted to leave on the 6pm shuttle bus. However, at just ten past six, a minivan pulled over and the driver told us that the big bus couldn’t come up because the road was covered in snow and the snow ploughing vehicle broke down. There was already quite a queue, and the minivan could only take 9 people at a time. We had no choice but to wait in the snow at what we estimated to be a temperature of -10 degrees.

Some other groups decided to ski or snowboard their way down the mountain (that’s crazy!), a few chose to walk down… it was about a 2 hours or so walk down in the heavy snow.

We finally got on the minivan after toughing it out in the snow for about 2 hours. Our clothes and backpacks were all covered in centimeters of snow by then. Whew. On the way down, the driver picked up some people who were walking down and were freezing because of the weather. He yelled at them “What the F*** are you guys doing, you’re F***ing mad!”… and then let them squeeze in with us. A few of those in our group had to take the next ride down since the van wasn’t big enough to carry all of us and they came out later.

We finally got back to the Skytrain station at 9+pm, had pizza for dinner and went back home. What a day.

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