Two weeks ago (before the storm and such), I took another trip to Whistler, this time with friends (and no kids). Eric (Group Program Manager for Microsoft's Digital Memories team) has a place up there and invited me and Chris (architect-type dude on Live Platform or some such thing) up for a boys weekend. It must have been an unofficial Microsoft weekend up there. We ran into zillions of Microsoft folks, including a girls trip of folks from my team (Kristen, Kellie, and Kellie's non-MS friend Juli) and Eric's sister, Stacey (who is a developer at Microsoft). We wound up hanging out with the girls and skied some with a bunch of other MS guys too. 

  

It was really different skiing with adults vs. chasing Andrew (9) down the hill. My legs were definitely not ready for real skiing, plus I think my skis are simply too advanced and long for me. I was dying, but we had really good days for skiing. One of the fun things I did this time was wear my Garmin Forerunner 301 GPS while I was skiing. I used SportTracks (still one of my favorite apps) to pull the data off and then converted the tracks to Google Earth for a 3D rendering of the days' work. (You can see three tracks in the image above. The rightmost is the first day I skied on Whistler. The left tracks are on Blackcomb. The first track is me, the second track is Eric (who skied out down the mountain). Whistler Village is in the lower left corner.) 

We also enjoyed the great apres-ski scene Whistler has to offer including many beers at the Longhorn Saloon (the inspiration for the codename of Windows Vista too, btw) and a great dinner at the Bearfoot Bistro, complete with Eric sabering a bottle of sparkling wine open (which is super fun incidentally, if a little less dramatic than one might expect.

Fortunately, the drive home was much easier than last time. I'm ready for another trip any time, hopefully with some new skis (maybe the Volkl AC2...)