Bagby videos

Here are a bunch of videos from when my friend Sharon (who I've been staying with the past week) and I went to Bagby hot springs, a little over an hour outside of Portland. From the parking area there's a mile-and-a-half walk up to the springs along a gorgeous path through the woods and alongside a river. Both Sharon and I had cameras that we were taking videos with. So these are a little out of order, as the first two here are from my camera, then the next three are from hers. So, this first one is at a bridge over the river, where I'm shooting some video of....Sharon shooting some video! (see below for further explanation). And I just have to say, I realize that it's not the best-looking hat in the world, but hey, it keeps my head warm!:

Bagby video 2

Finished soaking, and I tried to get video of the tub we used, but didn't want to be pointing it in the face of the other people who were still in there (so I pointed it in Sharon's face instead):

Bagby video 3

Here's a short one, of a nice babbling creek along the way:

Bagby video 4

Here we are at the second bridge along the hike, not far from the hot springs. Sharon is shooting this one with her camera. And I was shooting video at the same time, although I didn't realize she was also. So when she looks up and says "Hi Gabe" in this one, it's the exact same moment as when she says the same thing in my video (included above):

Bagby video 5

Here we are just arriving at the main hot tub area:

headed back to Portland...

Well there's a slight modification to my winter plans. In short, I'm pretty sure that I'm now headed back down to Portland and my old job. I was looking for a place to live here with a girl from Australia (who is actually Indian, so would have been my second Indian roommate up here). I met her at the hostel in Whistler, and she's the one who told me about the Silver Star resort (where I am right now). So I met up with her again once I got here and we were looking around for possible places to live. We found one great option, a B & B that rents out its rooms long-term during the ski season. It was really nice, they had a hot tub and a nice kitchen for the people staying in their three rooms, and although the rooms were $750 each, one of them was really big and we were thinking we could share it and have really reasonable rent, especially for such a nice place.

The only problem was that it's a ten minute drive down the hill from the ski resort, and she doesn't have a car. She checked about the shuttle bus that runs up and down the hill, but it doesn't make any stops along the way, just picks people up in town and takes them all the way up to the resort. Her only other two options were either buying a car, or else hitchhiking, which the owner of the B & B said other people had done with plenty of success, since everyone is just going to the ski resort. But understandably, she didn't want to be relying on that throughout the winter. So anyway, the point being that other than that we both would have definitely gone for it. But I didn't want to pay that much by myself, and most of the people up here looking for work (about 90% of them young Australians) don't have cars, so I didn't want to take a chance at finding someone else. She's decided to stay here long-term at the hostel, even though it's more expensive and you end up sharing a much smaller room between 4 people. But it's a five minute walk from the slopes and all the jobs, so it's real convenient. But I'm not up for living in the cramped quarters through the winter, after doing it in Jasper for a couple of months. And all the other housing options I found were too expensive.

As for the jobs, I was offered a job at a bakery in the little village area right near the ski slopes. That might have been okay, but I wasn't super excited about it (not to mention getting up early) and the pay wasn't great. So basically, I'd be making less money than I was in Jasper, and paying more for rent. And purely from a money perspective, my best bet for now is taking back my old delivery job in Portland. Although I would love to spend the winter a short walk from skiing, I also want to be saving some money. And for the price of staying at the hostel here I could have my own 1 bd. apartment to myself back in Portland. Although, my plan is to find something even cheaper, i.e. shared housing, so that I can be saving up as much as possible. And besides I'm realizing that after 14 months of traveling, being back in familiar territory sounds fine with me right now, even if it does mean enduring another rainy Oregon winter. But the good news is that the ski slopes are only an hour away from there, so I can still get in some winter sports.

I'm planning to take off from here tomorrow (Thursday) morning. I got a new radiator for the Toyota and an oil change, so it's in good shape now. I checked mapquest and it says it's only a 9-hour drive to Portland from here. I definitely don't plan to do it in a day either way, and am still considering making a detour over to Vancouver Island for a few days, then taking the ferry from Victoria over to the Olympic peninsula and going down that way. But considering that Thanksgiving is a week from today, I'm thinking of planning to be in Portland for Thanksgiving. I emailed my aunt Jeannie and they'll be there, so I can hang with the family. I had been hoping to make it down to my aunt Chris' in California to do Thanksgiving with her and Marie, my mom, step-dad, brother and Lesley. But I'm definitely not feeling up for that long drive at this point. So that's too bad, but at least I do have the other option there in Portland. Anyhow I'll talk to y'all pretty soon once I'm back in the U.S.A.

Kakwa Ecovillage

Here are a number of videos that I'd shot after leaving Jasper, but didn't get the chance to upload until now. The first here is at Kakwa Ecovillage, a community in progress that I visited, just a few hours from Jasper, but over the border and the Rockies, in B.C.:

the main house...

The main house at Kakwa Ecovillage, just as it's started snowing:

On the road...

Here's a nice scene of the snowfall along the road while driving south from Kakwa Ecovillage:

more scenes from the road...

Here's another shot from the road while driving south towards Vancouver, but still pretty far north in B.C.:

a snowy lake...

Here's some video of the same lake where I took the photos below (just noticed I'm doing my best impression of a troll or something else grumpy at the start):

snow in Whistler, B.C.

Here are some photos taken while walking the day after it snowed, from the hostel where I was staying into the swanky little village area of Whistler, a couple of miles away. (Some of which are slightly crooked due to balancing the camera on my backpack...) I've got a number of videos to upload at some point as well, but the connection here isn't fast enough, so I'll have to do that another time:

Kakwa Ecovillage

Here are some photos of Kakwa Ecovillage, in eastern B.C., which I visited for a few days after leaving Jasper:

photos of Silver Star

Here are a few photos taken today of the commercial village area clustered around some of the ski lifts here at Silver Star. The hostel I'm staying at is just a few minutes walk from here. The lifts aren't actually open yet, the one skier below is doing cross country:

SIlver Star ski resort, B.C.

I'm now at Silver Star ski resort near Vernon, B.C. It looks great so far, much more along the lines of what I'm looking for than Whistler, and apparently way easier to find jobs and accomodation. Whistler is of course world famous, and so it was just inundated with too many people looking to live there for the winter. But the hostel here is practically empty right now, even though the season starts in a week or two. This place is much smaller in general than Whistler, but I really like the feel of it, more of a local place and less swanky and yuppified. No offense to yuppies. So if all goes well and I'm able to find a decent job and housing, both of which sound pretty doable, then I'll likely stick around for a while. Also the skiing still looks pretty good, even though it's not on the same scale as Whistler. Click on the subject line above and it will take you to their website where you can see some photos of Silver Star and see a map of their ski runs.

snow in Whistler

I've been in Whistler a couple of days now, and got here just in time to see the snow. Woke up this morning and it was coming down pretty good. Only problem is that it warmed up enough to start raining on it later in the morning, and now it's mostly gone. But at least I got a good taste of it, and it's still sticking around just a little farther up in the hills.

So I stayed at one hostel the first night, on Sunday; then they were full up for Monday night, so I switched over to another one and paid for four days in advance, until Friday morning. I'm doing some looking around for jobs, and it sounds like it wouldn't be too hard to find one. The major problem is that accomodation is almost impossible to find, and if you do find something then $600/month is about the cheapest, for a shared living arrangement of some sort. Because of all the construction taking place for the 2010 Winter Olympics, a lot of the construction workers are apparently being housed up here, making the housing situation even tighter than normal. I've met tons of people in the hostel who are also looking for jobs and housing for the coming ski season, and so unfortunately I'm here right when everybody else is looking to get set up for the winter as well.

So I'm going to keep my eyes open for the next couple of days and just see what happens, but I don't have high expectations of ending up finding anything. But I'm not too attached to it either. Whistler looks pretty nice and it would be an amazing place to ski, but there are lots of other ski resorts in B.C. that won't have the same deluge of people showing up, so I might just head out at the end of the week and look elsewhere. If the snow comes back in the next couple of days however, I might stick around just a little longer to at least try and get in some cross country skiing or snowshoeing. It seems like that might even be possible already in the upper elevations, I'll have to find out. So, I'll just post any further developments whenever they happen.....

leaving Vancouver...

I'll keep this short as I'm leaving town pretty soon. I got into Vancouver last Thursday night, and stayed at the Cambrie hostel, in Gastown near downtown, the past three nights. It was actually a little bit of culture shock coming into the big city after hanging out in Jasper, and I feel like in general I realized that I'm just not much of a city boy. Jasper, at a few thousand, felt like about the right size of a place to hang out in, especially with nice scenery around it. So I'm headed out of here shortly and driving up to Whistler just to check it out. I have a night reserved at the hostel for tonight, but unfortunately they were booked after that, so I'm not quite sure what I'll end up doing tomorrow. Hopefully another spot in the hostel opens up by then.

But I've had a pretty good time in Vancouver, despite the fact that I got sick right when I got here and it's still hanging around. But I'd met someone online before arriving, a girl from Japan who is now working at the University of British Columbia, and so we met up Friday night (which happened to be Halloween). We just had dinner at the pub next to the hostel I was staying at, and then today we went for a short hike just outside of Vancouver. And last night I went to see the movie "W.", which I definitely recommend, it was really well done. So, that's all for now, I'll just write again whenever I get the chance. I shot several videos but can't upload them yet, because I need someone's laptop in order to transfer the files from my camera card to a USB drive so that I can then upload them here to the blog. So who knows when I'll get around to doing that.

in McBride, B.C.

(This was actually written last Wednesday, Oct. 29th.)...

I'm now at Kakwa Ecovillage near McBride, B.C. (I got here Monday night)(click on the subject line above for their website). It's sort of a community in the works, with one main building, a garden, a couple of cabins and a big barn. They raise llamas and alpacas and use the wool to make assorted things to sell, i.e. warm socks. At the moment there are only three other adults here and one two-year-old. Yesterday I helped out digging a well in the barn to water the llamas for the winter. Today we'll be shoveling manure, yippee. So, all sorts of fun stuff to do. I guess during the summer there tends to be more people around, as they have a room with multiple beds that serves as a hostel (where I'm staying) and they get WOOFers coming through to help out and campers, plus other people who are involved in the community but don't necessarily live here full-time. It's a bit warmer here than Jasper, and it sounds like it's a bit milder in general here during the winter, but also a bit wetter. So, a pretty interesting place to check out. I'll take some photos today and may shoot a short video to put on the blog. I'm planning to take off tomorrow and head for Vancouver, so I'll write again soon.