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John, Ming, Chelsea and I just booked a trip to San Francisco May 10th and 11th. I’m going down a few days early for work. Should be fun!

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This weekend the guys are up at Whistler for the Telus Festival. Thursday afternoon we arrived to fully stocked condos (thanks JJ) and then that night we went to the pro photographer showdown before drinking too much, skied Friday (it was cold with a little fresh snow), then a fashion show last night (too much ski gear, not enough summer wear) and today it’s hot and sunny and Ming is cooking up some bacon and eggs (I didn’t sleep last night, too much Redbull at the Beagle.)

In other news I’m way behind on blogging. I still need to post photos from Ben’s 30th birthday weekend at Hood Canal and the trip Chelsea and I took to Steven’s Pass last weekend.

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Ming, Joe and I are in the Audi headed to Panorama for heli-skiing. I know a number of people are concerned so here are the avalanche conditions for the area. Of course the heli-ski operations describes the conditions as, “Excellent! In boot-top Pow-Pow!”

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This past weekend we went down to the Gorge. Some professional photos were shot. Here’s one of our boat:

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I flew into hot and sunny Oakland this morning. Only 90′!

This evening we saw the Giants play the Mets and they whooped them 9-4. Molina got two home runs in the fifth evening.

Here’s Barry Bonds up at bat:

Now I’m watching Harold and Kumar; funniest movie ever.

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When the ski season was sucking here in February we should have been going to Banff every weekend!

I just booked a ticket to Calgary for April 25th and it was only $105! We’ll then head up to Banff for a few days and on April 29th I’m flying out of Calgary to Las Vegas for three days where I will be speaking at the Microsoft Mix conference.

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Early December, around the usual time that I start thinking about buying a ticket to fly home to Winnipeg I took a look at airfares and found nothing for under $1000 out of Vancouver, Seattle was already way jacked up. And so, John and I have decided to drive the 1644 miles / 2645 kilometers, we’ll leave sometime this afternoon or evening.

Seattle to Winnipeg Hosted on Zooomr

Now, every single person I have mentioned this too thinks I am out of my mind. Maybe its the recent tragedy in Oregon or the recent natural disaster in Seattle where 53,000 are still without power that is making everyone super cautious. Or maybe its just that Americans are more hesitant about long cross country trips. See, I think back to my time at the University of Waterloo which is a similar distance, 1322 miles, when we made the trip back and forth and no one called us crazy. It’s just what you did to get home.

Least you worry too much, yes we have experience driving long distances (I’ve driven between Waterloo and Winnipeg at least three times and have driven from Toronto to Seattle), yes we have experience driving in the snow (we’re from Winnipeg), yes we will have warm clothes (we are driving to Winnipeg after all!) and no we are not taking the Neon. And yes, this will likely affect the amount of time I spend in Winnipeg, but by no more than a day or so. And yes, this means I have more money for Christmas presents!

…For interest sake I pulled how much my last two flights to Winnipeg cost (both out of Vancouver and booked last week of November/first week of December). 2004 was $670CDN and the trip there took over 24 hours; it would have been faster to drive because of flight delays that meant I had to stay overnight in Vancouver. 2005 was $879CDN and was also delayed but by only several hours. Given that you need to budget at least five hours for flights out of Vancouver, possibly more if the border is likely to be delayed, and it’s three to four hours to get to Winnipeg depending on if you have to layover or not, driving really isn’t that much longer :).

For curiosity’s sake flights are now $2500CDN+, will take anywhere from 9 to 18 hours and have multiple connections on the east cost, either Montreal, Toronto, or both! A random weekend in February is $770.

If there are any sights or stops we should be making along the way please leave a comment.

Update: Eric just ruined my vacation after pointing me to Kayak and I found this best price trend for SEA to YWG for the 23rd. Apparently December 7th was the time to buy.

BestFareTrend Hosted on Zooomr

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Alrighty, finally, the blog post from New York. Let’s re-wind back to the 16th.

Thursday: We slept in (we spent both Wednesday night and Thursday night at the Belvedere (which was a perfectly fine hotel), grabbed breakfast at Pigalle a french cafe not far from the hotel (I should have had a croissant sandwich).

We then subwayed down to Century 21. If you’re in New York and you’re into clothes you have to check out Century 21. Why? It’s a massive discount store with amazing deals on a wide range of brands. Brands like Penguin, Le Tigre, Diesel, Chip and Pepper, Seven, DKNY, Juicy Couture and on and on. Now while you can get a pair of Diesel jeans for $50 you likely only have one style to choose from and it might be a style that is clearly something only suitable for a discount retailer because no one wanted to buy them from the gay boutique in Chelsea. So be careful not to get sucked into the deals just because they’re deals :). The other catch with Century 21 is that, at least for men’s wear, there are no change rooms! This means you should wear a t-shirt so you can at least try on shirts and sweaters. But for jeans unless you know your size (which for me varies by jean manufacturer and sometimes varies across their lines) you will likely be buying a couple different pairs and returning the one’s that don’t fit. Anyhow, the place is often a zoo but deals can be had. I loaded up here and ’saved over $650!’ :P.

For dinner we ate at Thai place in midtown named Chanpen Thai. Then we headed off to see the Broadway show Grey Gardens. We had mistakenly thought it was a play but it turned out to be a musical. Unfortunately I didn’t quite appreciate it as much as Alex since it’s based on a documentary I haven’t seen and I’m also not much of an American royalty follower so I’m not up on the last hijinks of the Onassis’s and Kennedy’s.

Afterwards we had drinks at two wine bars, the first in midtown, [insert name], and at another in Chelsea named Veloce. Before dropping into Veloce we prowled around the neighborhood and had $1/drinks at an absolutely trashy gay venue named View Bar (not recommended). Sadly I forgot about the Tech Crunch party at Bungalow 8 (a very upscale club that is impossible to get into unless you’re a cast member on a WB show).

Friday: Friday we slept in again and then switched hotels to the Hampton Inn (nicer than the Belvedere but pricier). Next we grabbed breakfast at Cosmic Diner. Then we trekked over to Central Park to enjoy the New York sunshine.

Katrina and I then split off from the group and headed down to SoHo to hit up the G-Star store and learned that the next trend in men’s jeans will be all black jeans (ugh). Instead of SoHo we should have gone skating in the park (next time).

After SoHo a few of us went to the MOMA for Target Free Friday Night. We had been warned there would be a big line, and there was, but it moved fast and we were inside in less than five minutes.

For dinner we went to a tapas place, Oliva, in the lower east side, drank lots of sangria and ate lots of food. It was loud, yummy and fun. They also packed us in so tight that you couldn’t go to the bathroom without clearing the tables out of the way, gotta love New York.

Next Bria led us on a tour of the L.E.S. (which one of us embarrassingly asked what it stood for) as none of us had partied here before. We started at Verlaine for $4 lychee martini’s that was packed with an incredibly diverse range of people all sucking down cheap martini’s. Then it was onto Suba a restaurant/bar with a fancy interior featuring a grotto downstairs, worth checking out for the interior alone. Next we went to The Delancey which looked to be like a cool bar with a view of the Williamsburg Bridge exit but oddly no one was there. Next it was off to the Stanton Social Club which was the highlight of the night with mini-burgers, beautiful people, nice interior design, and boy was it packed. Definitely violating some crowding laws. After the Social Club we went to the French bar Cafe Charbon were we saw the L.E.S. shirts. Then we ended the night at Happy Ending a massage parlor turned club but sadly it wasn’t the happy ending we were looking for to a long night but it had to do since it was nearly morning.

Saturday: Saturday we slept in again (noticing a trend?) grabbed breakfast at a touristy diner and then Ben and I headed down to West Chelsea to hit the gay shops and boutiques (it’s so nice to visit stores just for men). Since I spent my budget at Century 21 I held back and watched Ben drop lots of money on some great items. We also visited a couple stores in search of Freitag bags and found a motherlode at Atrium which looked to be a great shop in SoHo which I wish we had more time to explore but we had to meet up with the other kids at Magnolia bakery to have some cupcakes to celebrate Alex’s birthday. That place was a zoo and the cupcakes rich.

Next it was off to Better Burger for some organic goodness. Next stop was the hotel for a nap.

Before our 10pm dinner reservation we headed to The Dove a great lounge in Greenwich that I’ll definitely go back to if I’m in the neighborhood. We showed up before the 9pm rush and the hostess was very nice and let us sit at a reserved table for a couple rounds of drinks. Then we grabbed dinner at a little ten table French restaurant named, [insert name], and had a great, rather affordable meal (we had wanted to go to pricey Nobu but the only sitting they had was at 11:15pm! Next time we’ll book restaurant reservations with our plane tickets). After dinner I tried to lead a tour of the Meat Packing District and West Chelsea. We started at the Highline, a place I could imagine the older Jetson kid’s grabbing a drink at. It even had a small splash pool in the basement.

But the crowd was too young and we felt out of place and so we headed to The Park which when you first get in feels like a small lounge but we discovered the place had many many rooms. We had a drink and explored the garden, the patio, the upstairs dance floor, the fireplace rooms and the hot tub area (closed) but again the crowd wasn’t right and people weren’t really getting their dance on.

Next stop, West Chelsea. Unfortunately we rolled into West Chelsea sometime close to 2am and everything was at capacity. Buying a bottle here or there (at $360/bottle) could have gotten us in, or Katrina and I on our own could have gotten in on our own, but with three guys (even though one was gay) and two girls made it hard. So we had some drinks at Brite Bar, a lounge on the corner (recommended). After a few drinks I scoped out Marquee and we decided to try and get in and fortunately they let us past the velvet rope. Marquee was pretty cool, decent music and all and two dance floors but not amazing. When we spilled out in the wee hours of the morning (4am-ish) there was tons of cabs but they were all full. Katrina and I headed off uptown on foot but ended up taking a cycle-rickshaw the twenty blocks back to the hotel (cycle rickshaws appear to be more prevalent in New York than in India).

Sunday: Oddly I was less hung over today and spent my few hours between waking up and leaving first at Century 21 returning a pair of jeans that were too tight and then getting lost on the subway (a bunch of lines weren’t running and I got confused about local vs express trains).

We then had a thankfully uneventful flight home. Though as soon as I dropped my bag off I picked up my hockey bag and headed out to a game with John. Even though I was exhausted I scored two goals :).

Photos: You can find them all of the real ones on Zooomr and some camera phone ones on Flickr.

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We (a motley crew of friends from Microsoft, Amazon and Redfin) went to Whistler for American Thanksgiving. Drove up Wednesday and skied, apres-skied, hot tubbed, ate and drank pretty much for four days straight. I am now in desperate need of a day off from both working and vacationing.

While there I bought a new pair of skis, a pair of Head Monster IM 88’s (with bindings since tried as they could, they couldn’t get my red and chrome Nordica bindings to mount). I had been planning on buying new skis around Christmas time but with so much snow coming to the north west so soon I couldn’t wait any longer and had to make an impulse buy. There was simply no way I would bother hiking up to closed lifts with my skinny pair of Dynastar’s. But with a pair of fatter skis, hike we did :), and we scored some great powder runs. My new DaKine Heli Pack came in very handy on the hikes but it needs a heated drinking tube since for two days it was -15′C in the alpine, brrrr!

The drive home was epic since there was snow all the way from Whistler to Seattle which is pretty unheard of. Facing a four hour delay at the border, our driver and my co-worker, Rob made the executive decision we would stop at Vijs in Vancouver for a gourmet Indian dinner before braving the conditions in his rear wheel drive 5-series BMW (which is odd since Rob owns no less than three Land Cruisers! (down from a high of five!) Apparently his tabs were expired which is why he couldn’t bring one up). Anyhow, I highly recommend Vijs for Indian fusion and always take your most capable vehicle to the mountain.

For what it’s worth, I’m also burned out on the Whistler club scene. They really need to get some more upscale places where you don’t have to deal with artificial lines because the coat check person can’t keep up with the mandatory coat check rule, where they turn on the heat to make up for the fact that the line causes their door to be open a lot, where they know that Maker’s Mark isn’t a vodka and where the place isn’t full with nineteen year olds.

We were also disappointed the outdoor hot tub at our hotel wasn’t available. While it was functional they lacked the necessary government permits to open it up after doing some renovations. It’s inexcusable they didn’t have this resolved before opening weekend!

I’ll link to photos as others post them…

Update: Ming’s Whistler Photos.

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Wow. It only took 12 hours door to door to get from my house to our hotel in Manhattan on Wednesday. The hang up was while we were flying to JFK we had to stop at Newark to re-fuel because we were running out of fuel circling JFK waiting to land (something about fog). And silly me, I declined the gross $5 bagel sandwiched offered an hour in because it wasn’t going to be that long of a flight but after not eating for 13 hours I wish I had gotten the bagel.

But once in Manhattan Ben and I met up with Katrina and headed to Xing for dinner, then Therapy for drinks then Vlada. Here’s a photo of Vlada’s bar.

Notice the strip of snow running down the middle where you can rest your drink to ensure it stays cool.

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