Time to Zip!

     For our one year wedding anniversary (June 2024), I decided that a Canada do-over was in order. The reason for this was because we had a $300 credit for Ziptrek Ecotours burning in my pocket that I needed to use. The plan was to be fairly quick about it. I had decided that if we drove up to Whistler and did the zip almost immediately, maybe I would miss the brain-cold-fuzzies (for context on this, please read Honeymoon Part 3). 

    In addition, there was no LTX this year (The timing wouldn't be right anyhow). So I didn't need to plan around that at all. We were going to completely avoid downtown Vancouver this time, which was definitely okay by Patrick since he's the one driving. I found a hotel in North Vancouver on the bay (Ocean Promenade Hotel) that looked really nice that we would stay in on Day 1, and then stay at a hotel in Whistler proper on Day 2 (Evolution Whistler). Whistler in the summer, not on a Saturday night, is actually quite cheap and definitely worth it.

    Once we reached Canada, we had one stop to make before checking into our hotel on the bay. The farmhouse on Smallville. Yeah, that's right. Smallville was filmed in Canada and they used a house right on the Canadian border with Washington for some outdoor shots, I guess. A farm next door was having a
wedding, so we sneakily used their parking and walked to the house. Obviously we didn't bother them. There was an equestrian trail next to the house where I
got a couple of shots of the windmill and where they had the "Kent Farm" sign. After that, we checked into our hotel. The weather was going to be pretty great so we were lucky. All the rooms at this hotel were pretty sweet and I loved ours. Every room had a large balcony with a view of the bay, right on the downtown street where you can walk to restaurants and such. It reminded me a lot of Alki Beach in Seattle. 

    We walked to a long boardwalk that lead into the bay, and then walked to dinner from there. We watched the sunset also, which was quite nice. The weather overnight was going to be partly cloudy, but because the beach was facing south, I wanted to give myself a chance to take photos of the milky way. Turns out it was much too bright for something like that, which was unfortunate. 

    Our reservation for the zipline wasn't until 12:30pm, so we lazily made our way up to Whistler. I was not going to have a repeat of last year where I booked ourselves like crazy and we had to rush from place to place and feel stressed. No stress allowed this time!

    We were too early to check into our hotel, so we parked at Whistler Village and walked around until it was time to check in. Patrick and I were both nervous. Neither one of us had ziplined in 10-15 years, and my zipline was babyish compared to what we were doing this time. You see, when I went to book our times, the credit didn't match up with the pricing. If I bought the Bear line, which is what we had originally booked last year (and was the "beginner" course), we would have $20 left over that we couldn't use. So I booked the Eagle course, for the "people who knew what this was all about", for $20 extra instead. We basically drove half way up Blackcomb mountain to start, and zipped our way back down to Whistler Village. Patrick hates heights, but from what he had told me about zipping in Mexico, where you have to break yourself by hand (??!!), this was going to be much better. It was still very hard to take that first step off of each platform, and even by the end I never got 100% used to it. Was it worth it? Sure. Would I ever do it again? No thank you. I have the Gopro video so that's good enough for me, thanks! lol

    We immediately went to check into our hotel after, and I specially chose this place for one reason: It had a dry sauna. That's why I loved Scandinave Spa so much. That smell of cedar while sitting in a hot, dry room was heaven. And the hotel was freaking amazing. It had a split bedroom and living room thing with a gas fireplace in the center. A massive bathroom with the biggest soaking tub I had ever seen, a really nice kitchen, and it was backed up to a forest with a balcony and a view of a mountain. I'd say the only downside was that these hotels were built for winter activities, so it had features like a heated floor (which was definitely not needed right now- it was around 78 degrees outside), but that also meant the minisplit that cooled the room only went down to 65, which wasn't nearly cold enough for sleeping. (And unfortunately, the fireplace kicked out some heat too so I couldn't even leave it on! We had to leave the balcony door open most of the night, which was certainly a risk as we were backed up to a forest, but I couldn't sleep otherwise.) I immediately jumped into the bath and soaked for a good 30 minutes and Patrick took a nap before we headed back to Whistler Village for dinner. We had made reservations at a fairly fancy Italian restaurant for our anniversary dinner called Quattro. My dinner was delicious but Patrick absolutely loved his spicy pasta. After dinner we headed back to the hotel to check out the hot tub and sauna as the sun set before heading to bed.

I have one weird story to tell and I don't think I can adequately describe what happened to us. So our car was in an underground parking garage with a gated entrance. Patrick had parked our car around a corner in the garage when we checked in. And when we came back to drive to our dinner reservation, our car was nowhere to be found. I began to panic, wondering if it had somehow been stolen, which would have been nearly impossible - it was a gated garage! We walked in, walked out, went back to the lobby, walked back out to the gate... nothing was making sense. We had no one to ask because Evolution didn't have a front desk (their sister hotel had checked us in). Turns out, the garage had two identical levels, and when we had used the elevator to go to like, P1, it was the lower level. We had parked on the "lobby level" of the garage, I guess. It was surreal, though. We thought we had entered an alternate dimension. And the time we wasted trying to figure it out almost made us late for our reservation!

We had a decision to make today: we needed to either leave early to avoid afternoon traffic on south I-5 (and in Vancouver as well), or leave late to hopefully skip all of the backup. In the end, we decided to leave late so we could spend more time in Whistler being lazy. We grabbed an easy breakfast at a nearby coffee house and took it back to our balcony to enjoy it before we checked out. We spent much of the morning shopping at Whistler Village before we headed back towards home. We caught the very tail end of Vancouver traffic, but completely skipped south I-5 traffic and made it home by 10pm. All in all, a very nice and relaxing anniversary. 

Canopy Tours NW

For the record, this is not the first time I've done a zipline. Unfortunately, I never finished my previous blog post about going on the zipline at NW Trek because it included a write up about the whole facility and I never finished editing the many many pictures I took. I know, sad, because I had the most freaked out experience ever and I really should just post it as a separate entry but anyway, I digress.

Despite the "issues" I had at NW Trek, I flipping loved the zipline and knew that I wanted to do it again someday. Fast forward to yesterday. I got invited to a friend's reception dinner (he got married at the courthouse on Friday) waaaay up in Marysville, which is like an hour and 10 minutes from my house. I figured, if I'm going up there for a dinner, I might as well make a day of it and find something else to do.

Line 2

I'd been toying with the idea of going to Canopy Tours NW, especially because they keep winning Evening Magazine's Best of Western Washington (this link is a good video of what it's about), but they are way up at Camano Island, and it's like $103. So, I kept pushing that idea aside. But yesterday I decided to be impulsive and just go with it. Now, Camano island is still 30 minutes north of Marysville but it was a heck of a lot easier to justify the drive up there now! It was going to be a nice day, and I was still able to buy tickets only a few hours in advance.

Each line gets more progressive and kind of builds up your confidence as you go. There are 6 in total, although line 5 is the longest (longer than the Space Needle is tall) and has the camera. I have to admit, I still felt a little trepidation stepping off of each platform. It didn't really get any easier! But, I have no irrational fear of heights so that wasn't an issue.

 Line 4

Line 5 

The views and scenery are amazing, the guides were awesome, and I felt safe the entire time. They taught me how to control the zip so that I wouldn't end up spinning around or landing backwards, and by line 5 I'd had it down perfectly enough to pose for the camera!

Although I had a great time, I'm still not getting that always talked about "adrenaline rush". I keep trying, but I kept wanting the zips to go slower so that I could look around and admire the landscape. I was concentrating too hard on keeping straight, and it was so fast that all I could really do was prepare to "land" on the next platform. That's the only part where my heart rate spiked, because you're coming straight at a tree going quite fast and the only thing that is going to stop you from slamming into it is a pully brake that the guide uses.

The last thing we had to do at the end was repel down 47 feet. This scared me a bit too, but turns out it was incredibly easy. 



















This is the view from on top of the repel tower

Now that I've done this, I don't think I will ever do it again - I don't need to. I still loved it, and it was a great experience, but I'm cool with just the one time.

What about you guys? Would you ever try this? Let me know in the comments!