Back in the dorm,

we found Ash's rucksack missing from her bed and replaced by a sleeping girl. Good God, I thought, what next? Ash started looking for her stuff amongst the rest of the gear strewn around the room while I went downstairs to talk to the duty manager.

It turned out that after we'd moved our stuff to the shared dorm and left for the day, a tour group staying at the hostel got antsy that perhaps they'd left some bags there. The (earlier) duty manager freaked out and put the single unclaimed bag - i.e. Ash's - onto the tour bus and forgot all about it. The tour group then came back four hours later after realising that the bag did not, in fact, belong to any of them. I picked it up from behind the counter and we finally got into our (separate) beds and conked out.

My welcome slumber lasted until 5 am, when I woke up in a greenhouse with an arid tongue and a parched throat. (What is it with hostels and heating?) The single, tiny window was opened as far as it could go, and the resultant 10-square-inch aperture was doing nothing at all to cool us down. Heating that had been woefully inadequate in the private room now combined with six heat-generating bodies to steam the place up to ludicrous levels. I think I heard everyone in the room get up and stagger to the toilet at least once and when, at 7 am, we could get up without unreasonably waking everyone else, we packed and checked the hell out of Dodge.

After a brief interlude to grab a room in a hotel for that night, we hit the slopes. To my surprise it was actually raining. I've never come across this while boarding except on particularly warm days in the Highlands, although it didn't seem to make much difference to the snow. We boarded and skied together until a bit after lunch, when Ash left for a hot chocolate and I left for the upper slopes. I made it as far as the Harmony Ridge by which time the weather had completely closed in; I couldn't see more than ten yards or so and I avoided the black couloirs that dropped into Harmony Bowl. Still, for a last run down (the lifts had already closed), it was fairly pleasant.

Back in our hotel room/studio apartment, revelling in comparative luxury, we stuck a frozen pizza in the oven and vegetated in front of Lost. It was positively Epicurean after the hostel, and my aching muscles thanked me for it. Ash's persistent lurgy came to a head with a mild fever that night, and thankfully the next day she was on the mend. That morning we forewent the opportunity for pay $80 for another rainy day of zero-visibility skiing and boarding and caught the lunchtime coach back to Vancouver. The scenery along the Sea-to-Sky Highway was incredible, and the tiny town/ferry terminal of Horseshoe Bay seemed really familiar; maybe there's a bit of Morvern Callar's port in that neck of the woods.

We spent the last few days trying to soak up some of the Vancouverite atmosphere, wandering around the hipster neighbourhood of Gastown, taking advantage of Dine Out Vancouver with some lavish dining in Nu and meeting up with Christina again in indie bar par excellence the Railway Club.

I must confess to finding it a bit of an odd holiday: coming right after a week of work made it difficult to get into the holiday swing of things; Whistler only intermittently avoided being utterly frustrating and the grey weather was entirely too Scottish for its own good. But hey, one drunken, starlit walk through bobcat-infested woods will make up for a lot of mediocrity.