As we prepare for our next trip in the bus, I am reminded that I never finished the blog post for our last one! It was Zara’s birthday in May, and another one of our friends has a birthday couple days earlier. Because of this, it has become a bit of a tradition that we do a trip in the bus celebrate. Last year was our trip to the Whistler gun range as many of us had never done that before, and this year we headed back to Whistler for some zip-lining down the mountain! We have another friend who has been working as a zip line instructor up there so it just seemed like the perfect opportunity.

Curtains for the windows were the last thing that we really wanted to have done before heading up, because if there’s one thing we’ve noticed about sleeping in the bus: it’s that waking up with the sun is not always what you want when you’re on vacation. Zara and Marco ( my future best man 😉 ) worked on hanging these while we headed into the city to pick up the gang.

As you can see in the first video, it was raining as we left the bust storage. We drove east into the city to pick everyone else up along the Sky Train line, which is about an hour drive. The weather cleared as we headed north onto the sea-to-sky and actually got sunny heading up towards Whistler. The drive itself was uneventful, and we arrived at the RV site in good time.

The one thing that you can’t really see in these photos is the temperature. It was may, and a below average may, and many thousand feet up above sea level where we started the day. We’re all troopers though and bundled up for our high speed flight through the cold mountain air. Before I jump into those photos, I would like to talk a little bit about water. Many months prior, I had re-plumbed all of the water hookups so that we would be able to plug in the RV park connection and use the water in the sink. I must say I was very excited to finally be able to use the sink and everything like normal, but alas, I had put a male hose connection on the end, which was backwards of what was needed for this rv park… but more on that later, first we went zip-lining!

The Zip-Trek course that we did up there was fantastic, lots of amazing views and the guides made it really fun. They also have the longest zip line in the US and Canada, but that was still closed for the winter, so we’ll have to go back again sometime! We spent some time in Whistler village afterwards and picked up a new connector for the water hose (yay!). Unfortunately, the joy was short-lived, after getting it hooked up I discovered that a couple key connections were leaking and I didn’t have the parts to get them fixed properly. In the end we had the water going while we washed dishes etc, but I definitely feel like that was a defeat, and I will get that ready before our next trip.

On Sunday, Zara and I had an appointment to check out a camp which we thought about renting for our wedding so we hit the road pretty early.

As we headed down the highway the clouds cleared ff, the sun came out and there were some breathtaking views. We’ve all driven this highway before but the bright blue sky against the white snowy mountains was something special that morning. We had to stop and have a little impromptu photo session at the viewpoint.

We rolled into Squamish around lunch time and stopped for a nice meal at White Spot. With some more time to kill afterwards, we decided to do a little stop at Shannon Falls, which was very busy on this beautiful day. We took advantage of the bus parking that was there, which probably saved us a lot of headache as there were lots of cars circling around with no place to park.

Leaving Squamish, we headed north east down a smaller highway, which turned off into a street that became skinnier and skinnier as we headed deeper into the mountains. The bus has been many places before, and I have navigated it through some unbelievably tight spaces so there’s not much that gets me nervous, but I have to say, the small service road leading into the camp was a new type of experience. Looking back I wish that we’d filmed the drive; it was a one-lane dirt road with exposed rocks and steep grades that must have been approaching 20-30%. It’s possible that my memory has it worse than it is but nonetheless this was off-road-ing for sure. We had been told that buses head down there regularly but it was only later that we discovered this was school buses, which have a much higher ground clearance than our coach. We definitely turned some heads and maybe caused a few heart attacks for oncoming traffic but the bus took it all with ease and hauled us up to the camp.

There were some other couples there for the tour and the bus took a few of them off guard.

We loved the camp, and were close to booking it for our wedding, but, in the end, the price point was a bit high for us and it wasn’t exactly the format that we wanted for the wedding. Either way it was an amazingly fun weekend and a great birthday for Zara. If you haven’t already, follow us on instagram (@abusnamedsteve) for more updates, and thanks for reading!