Driving to Whistler

We arrived in Vancouver to sunny blue skies!  We had about a two hour drive to get to Whistler.  

 Vancouver was a very new city.  It seemed like every building was made of entirely windows. 

 We drove through the city then into Stanley Park, which was a beautiful first taste of the Pacific Northwest. There was nothing but all diffferent kinds of pine trees!  My favorite!

 When we crossed over this bridge, we got our first clear gimple of the mountains we were headding into!

 The freeway was just cut into the sides of the mountains.  They did a major renovation for the Olympics, turning it into a 4 lane freeway with pull offs from just a 2 lane road.  Everyone we spoke to loved this as it made the drive into Whistler much smoother and faster.

 It was breathtaking to see these giant mountains coming right out of the ocean!

Here's another view of what we saw just outside Vancouver

 We stopped at this little community park on the way, and saw these skunk weed, one of the official "flowers" of March (I remember this because of my National Geographic books, and being sad that March, my birthday month was a skunk weed flower)

 All the way there, we were wondering how in the world they got these giant power line towers on the tops of these mountains!

 This was the little lake from the park.  It's one of Robb's favorite pictures because you can see the sky better in the water than the actual sky.  

 So, we'd heard of all this snow in Whistler, but still didn't see it for most of our drive.  Then about 1 and a half hours in, finally, we saw snow!

 It was interesting to be able to see the freezing level, the altitude on the mountain where rain turned to snow.  You can see in this picture the trees covered in snow higher up.

And finally, we arrived in Whistler!