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.