Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

Maxed out

Travel makes the heart grow fonder.
1504maxed

Travel makes the heart grow fonder. Or is that absence? Is there a difference? If you travel, aren’t you absent from the place you left? True, the point of travel is to go someplace, get somewhere yet still be in the moment enough to enjoy the journey, not focus on the destination, even though that was the whole point of the trip in the first place... unless you’re making a circuit, in which case you’re just going to wind up where you started, the place you’re absent from and growing fonder of. I think.

Obviously, travel makes the brain grow confused. And the writer grow tangential. Where was I headed when I started this? Not the trip, the column. I’m already lost.

Being on the road for a month now, there are several things I’ve grown fonder of and several things I’d happily spend the rest of my life avoiding. I’ve grown much fonder of my home. Home is where the… STOP with the cliches already. Jeez, it’s not like I even understand most of them.

Anyway, the more I travel around, the more I visit other ski resorts, the more I’m convinced I made the right decision when I bought a condo in Whistler on a whim almost 20 years ago. On my first ski trip to Whistler from the Old Country — Ontario — my skis and I parted company during a rapid descent on a blue run on Blackcomb where the terrain park now stands. If I had more ego, I’d say I got injured in the terrain park. But it was just a garden variety blue run then and I was messin’ with the laws of physics and, as you might guess, physics won.

Hurt, limping, chewing Tylenol #3 like it was gum and with three days left on a six-day ticket, I wandered the village like Quasimodo while my Perfect Partner skied. I’m not sure whether it was gravity or one of those long, crook-necked canes that dragged me into a real estate office but when I was spit out again, the idea of buying a condo I’d never seen in a resort I’d only spent 72 hours in made all the sense in the world. Ah, pharmaceuticals, ya gotta love ‘em.

During subsequent visits — when I finally got to see what I’d purchased — the combination of fun, pain and being in a place where winter was celebrated rather than tolerated convinced me it made sense to move here. If that seems rash, you have to remember there were a lot of people in the country around that time who thought mortgaging the house to buy Bre-X shares made sense. In hindsight, buying a Whistler condo I’d never seen made way more sense.

And now that I’ve lived in Whistler longer than anyplace else I’ve ever lived, I’m more convinced than ever it was a good move. Sure, there are infuriating, dopey, dumbass things about Tiny Town. Sure, we’ve lost our collective mind over the upcoming two week extravaganza. But there is so much Whistler’s done right.

First and foremost, the mountains still can’t be touched if skiing and boarding define who you are. All ski hills are fun… some are just funner than others. And this place is simply the funnest.

As big as the mountains are, the town is small. While I empathize with the weekend skiers who crawl back down the highway to Vancouver and beyond each Sunday evening, for the most part, Whistler isn’t experienced from the driver’s seat of a car… in heavy traffic… day in and day out, the way most of the front-range resorts I’ve been visiting in Colorado are. True, there are lots of things I’d like to see in town, lots of things I’ll never see because the non-residential space is just too dear to make such trivial pursuits work economically, but the compactness of our town trumps the sprawl of those other guys. It also makes Whistler village vibrate with life while most of the other places seem like Deadsville when the dinner hour’s over.

So travel, this travel, has made my heart grow fonder for the place I live.

One of the nice things about this trip has been keeping in touch with what’s going on north of the border. Thanks to Sue’s gift of a Sirius satellite radio, I’ve completely avoided Rush Limbaugh and the rest of the AM talk radioheads, I haven’t had to carry a library of CDs, I’ve enjoyed CBC and NPR and non-stop music in the deepest mountain valleys where only static lives otherwise and I almost feel as though I’ve got a foot, okay, a toe, dipped into 21 st century electronics.

I’ve really dug having Mae, the Magellan GPS guide me along the way. She doesn’t know where everything is and she makes eerie mistakes that are almost human but she doesn’t get pissy when I ignore her advice, she keeps me from trying to drive and look at a map at the same time and she’s very good at generating a list of restaurants that are close to the exact spot I’m standing on. That alone has kept me from eating trash food when there’s a perfectly good Mexican place I couldn’t see right around the corner. She’ll do the same thing for hotels when my eyes start to droop, keeping me from driving another 100 miles instead of turning around and going back two miles to the place I just passed.

I’ve rediscovered that expensive hotels really aren’t worth the money. I’ve stayed in $60 a night cheapies right next to the highway and heard the people on the other side of the wall laughing at reruns of I Love Lucy. I’ve stayed in suites that run close to a grand a night and heard the people in the next room watching war flicks, albeit on large, flat screen TVs while lounging in more comfy furniture and fluffy bathrobes.

I’ve had WiFi for free in every cheap hotel I’ve stayed at along the way and I’ve had to pay $10 a day for WiFi at the upscale spots if I wanted it in my room instead of trudging down to the lobby to have it for free while trying to write with noise and commotion going on around me.

I’ve washed my hair in free shampoo squeezed out of one-use packages in cheap hotels and I’ve washed my hair in hand lotion poured out of a beautifully, if illegibly, labeled bottle in an expensive hotel because it looked like shampoo, was sitting next to the shampoo and, well, nobody wears reading glasses in the shower. Duh!

But now, well, I’m back. If that sounds threatening, you must hold public office. For now though, I’m deep into the comforts of home. And my heart couldn’t grow much fonder. So there.