Another Day

So, I have arrived in Whistler. It’s seriously way beautiful. It’s about a two hour drive from Vancouver and the last hour or so is spectacular. After a bend in the road, looking over a very far drop the ocean comes into view, but it’s surrounded by mountains and has big, rocky islands spotted throughout. It’s important that I keep my eyes on the windy road, however, so I haven’t taken many lengthy looks. But the snap shots that my eyes reported to my brain were very agreeable. It reminds me of Alaska and Provo Canyon kinda mixed together. Wednesday was the first drive where I took up a group of people with me to Whistler. After dropping off my bags in my room (I’ll get to that in a minute) I went back to park the bus. The way we parked—wait, back up. Where we have available to us to park is dismal. We parked in there facing away from the exit and I voiced that it might be better if we at least angled ourselves the other way to make it easier to get out. The other drivers agreed. I moved my bus and when the next driver went to move his, stuck. So we figured we’d get that one unstuck in the morning and leave the others as they were.

When we returned in the morning at 9AM, the bus I had parked moved out perfectly. Another had been parked behind the others so it moved out just fine as well. The stuck one wasn’t going anywhere, even after half an hour of chains and sand. The chains burrowed nicely into the icy dirt making a cozy dual tire cradle for the bus to rest in until the tow truck giant wrecker tow mobile came. Oh, and the other bus that I hadn’t parked the night before but would be assigned to for the day was also stuck. So we had two stuck buses and a tow truck on the way. We waited in the little driver’s lounge and drank hot chocolate and three drivers against one dispatcher discussed Mormonism with another worker. It was pleasant enough, but she kept saying, “WOW” to anything pretty significant like “uh huh, you guys are nuts.” Haha But it was a fine discussion. The guy driver next to me went for the kill, ya know, right into the Joseph Smith seeing God story and I, who am very not ashamed of that story, still thought it just wasn’t the right setting for the whole explanation, but whatever, he went for it. Sometimes, in my personal opinion, ‘missionary mode’ is better left to missionaries, and ‘simple answers until further questions’ can be for the non-full time missionary members to practice, showing mostly a good, happy, real example of gospel living. I like to keep conversations real, two-sided, open for people that I’ll be working with instead of shooting out the whole story first chance they ask. But, best of all, just ask for and follow the Spirit.

Aaaanyway, so since it took about two hours longer than expected to back out the other two buses, Merilee and I have the day “off” until 4pm. We’re doing laundry and sleeping. Well, I’m obviously not sleeping at the moment, but I will. Gonna change the laundry first. I got pretty nice rusty chain juice all over my pants this morning. We’ll see if that comes out.

Our rooms are about ten by ten by ten. Four more feet than my body’s length all around? Yeah, that might be about right. There’s a door to get in through, a six-foot tall locker, a five foot tall boxy closet of sorts, a desk attached to the wall under a window and a bunk bed. I’m on top. So, all things considered…it’s not terrible. At least we only have two people in here. I heard that Security workers have four to a room. Yow. There are individual communal showers, if that makes sense, public restroom toilet stalls, even some urinals even though our trailer is all chicks inside. And there’s free laundry! And I have to go change mine. So, this is where I’ll end so I can sleep. A la prochaine!