Our Travel Blog: 2015 Holiday – Part 1 (Arrival & Surprise)!!

Well what a blur the last few weeks have been. After considering it for months, we only decided to book this trip at the beginning of December. Being the (everything well in advance) planner that I am, this made for a very stressful few weeks not only organising everything from home (including winter clothing during Summer in Brisbane) but also co-ordinating with mum who was already in the US and on a completely different time zone! And the biggest part of all – keeping everything a secret from the McMains!!!

We finally made it to Vancouver on December 21 after two flights and basically no sleep, checked into our hotel and reunited with mum (who came in on a later flight). It starts to get dark here from around 4pm so by the time mum arrived, we decided to wander up towards the shops, grab an early dinner and catch up before our big day the next day. Wade and I had been awake for around 32 hours by the time we went to bed, and thankfully both got a pretty good night sleep so we could hit the ground running the next day.

Day 2 and we picked up our hire car for the drive up to Whistler – and what a beautiful drive it was! We started seeing snow on the ground not long into the drive and about half way up it actually started snowing (it was tiny but we were definitely counting it)!

Guessing that the McMains were in ski school for the day, we had a few hours to kill. We didn’t really know how we were going to be able to surprise, them, but we did know where they were staying. So we went by their hotel just to double check if they were in their room or not, which of course they were not! So we decided to take a walk through the village towards the ski fields, just in case we happened to run into them (which was how we were hoping it would happen). Well we didn’t and by this stage our Condo (which was amazing by the way) was ready for us to check into so we went and did this and then waited……….

Not long after I got a message from Bel saying “You won’t believe who the other couple in our lesson are – Jason & Emma Croston!!” I used to work for Jason at SRJ and they were staying at the same hotel as the McMains!! It sure is a small world!!

What was also great about getting the message was that this was our cue!! The fact that she messaged me meant we knew they were finished skiing for the day and it was go time!! We quickly got ourselves sorted and wandered across to their hotel. Thinking they would be in their room by the time we got there we went to the reception desk and got a great Aussie girl who was going to help us out with our surprise – except that when she tried to call up – they weren’t in their room!!

She took our details and told us as soon as she heard from them, she would call us and help us pull it off!! So we headed back out into the village and just as we were about to turn the corner from the hotel – who do we happen to run into…….. the McMains and we got to surprise them in the way we had been hoping to!!!

Bel screamed so loud when she saw us – the people around us were staring and wondering what was going on. To say they were all surprised to see us was an understatement!! It was awesome and I’m so glad we were able to pull it off.

Once the excitement had died down and we had all caught up, we headed down to pick up our ski gear ready for the next day. We then all headed back to our condo for a dinner of pizza in front of the fire place.

Here are some photos from the first few days:

On our way to Vancouver (we were very tired at this point)!