Posts Tagged ‘British Columbia’
Breaking bad never felt so good
It’s not easy admitting your bad habits, but Sean Parrinder wants to know.
Sean is my personal trainer and confidante for the day at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler. He bears a passing resemblance to Justin Timberlake and I like that he doesn’t appear to be judging me.
“My body’s a temple,” I want to say. “A temple subjected to repeated bouts of vandalism at the hands of microbrewers and artisan bakeries.”
Instead I tell Sean: “Every year it’s the same. January rolls around and I follow my wife to the gym with extra pounds and good intentions. Trouble is I just meander from machine to machine, avoiding eye contact and wondering what the levers and pulleys do.”
Sean nods. “And then what do you do?”
“I walk the treadmill until it’s time to go.”
Sean applies his kinesiology degree and love of sport to helping kids and adults achieve fitness goals. At this time of year, his services are in demand as part of the Fairmont’s Breaking Bad Habits Whistler Getaway, a new year’s kickstart for that age-old resolution of getting fit.
Among other treats, the package includes an ‘energizer breakfast’ of strawberry and banana smoothie with dates, bee pollen, honey and orange juice, along with a toasted bagel with cream cheese. And there’s a Detox Body Wrap at the Vida Spa. But now is the hard part.
We’re in the discovery process of Sean asking me about my fitness goals and the habits I aim to break. I tell him that I need process, not procrastination; method, not mediocrity. Sean understands. He tells me to leave cardio till last and begin with tougher compound exercises, designed to work out multiple major muscle groups. We’ll focus on a lower range of repetitions – from five to eight – but increase the weight each time. Finally, we’ll monitor our rest periods and focus on breathing.
I warm up on the rowing machine and try to ignore Matt Damon staring at me from the cover of Men’s Fitness. We move on to the seated leg press – a machine I actually know how to use. You just sit down with your knees to your chest and straighten your legs by pushing away a weighted plate. The most I’ve ever pressed is 140 pounds, yet Sean starts me on eight reps of 180, eventually rising to eight at 200.
During the course of an hour, through lunges, squats, back extensions, and bar curls, Sean pushes me harder than I ever would have ever pushed myself. True, there are times when I want to punch him, but we high-five as I complete my final exercise; three sets of dips – gripping parallel bars, lowering my body so my arms are at 90 degrees before pushing my body up again. I learn which of my muscles are benefitted by each machine and feel better prepared for my next visit to the gym. But my excitement at completing the circuit is tinged with embarrassment. I realize I’ve been a bit of a wuss until now.
Ninety minutes later I’m acutely aware of the muscles I’ve worked. They’re aching, but I couldn’t be in a better place. Vida Spa claims to restore energy and promote well-being via a range of therapies, facials, wraps and exfoliations. The Breaking Bad Habits package includes an hour of the latter. As I’m rubbed down with course sea salt I can’t help thinking of an old soccer coach who used to recommend a meat pie and a pint as the best post-exercise routine.
After a quick shower I’m back on the massage table for a full-body application of shea butter and a scalp massage. My body has almost forgotten this morning’s workout. I feel like a basted turkey. Blissed out, I’m reluctant to leave the table but I’m instructed to take another quick shower. I return for a classic massage. Face down and somewhere near nirvana, I realize my body almost does feel like a temple!
I cap my afternoon’s decadence in the Fairmont’s Health Club, alternating between the sauna, steam room, hot tub and pools. I ponder how jealous my wife will be when I tell her about the shea butter, the scalp massage …
Sean spots me and recommends that I take a cold shower after each session in the sauna and steam room. “Always finish cool,” he says.
I decide to tell my wife about the cold showers.
- The Fairmont’s Breaking Bad Habits Whistler Getaway costs $569 per person and is available all year. It includes two nights’ accommodation, a Morning Energizer breakfast, a two-course Lifestyle Cuisine dinner, a 60-minute Detox Body Wrap at Vida Spa, Fairmont fit gear, and the choice of one of the following Fairmont Chateau Whistler Health Club activities: Aquafit, yoga, personal training session, resistance stretching or a one-hour personal running session per adult. Visit www.fairmont.com/whistler/ and click on ‘special packages’ or call 1 800 606 8244
1 800 606 8244.
Delicious cycle
With caffeine already coursing through our veins, Emara Angus talks us through our tea and chocolate options at Silk Road, part of The Pedaler’s Beans and Bites bike tour in Victoria.
It started as a compromise. With a few hours to see Victoria, the idea of a bike tour came up. According to Stats Canada, Victoria is the cycling capital of Canada. Any beer drinker knows it’s also the craft-brewing capital of Canada. The Pedaler, a new bicycle tour-company in town, offers Hoppy Hour, a three-hour guided tour of Victoria’s best breweries and brew pubs with some tasting thrown in.
“What about the kids?” my wife asks.
Ryan and Emma are teenagers, I point out. This doesn’t seem to answer my wife’s question.
“When my parents stopped at a pub, I got a packet of crisps, my brothers and the car radio for company,” I explain. “Sometimes there was a pub garden to play in.”
Apparently times have changed.
Cafe machiatto at Tre Fantastico, part of Victoria’s burgeoning coffee scene.
So we end up on The Pedaler’s Beans and Bites tour, a leisurely three-hour ride punctuated by frequent stops for great coffee, indulgent baked goods and a tea-and-chocolate tasting. As compromises go, this one turned out to be great.
We’re staying at The Parkside on Humboldt Street and walk just a few blocks to The Pedaler on Douglas. Within a few minutes of being fitted for bikes and helmets, and meeting our co-riders, we cycle right back to The Parkside. Tre Fantastico is on the ground floor of the hotel and it’s our first stop.
Coffee is very much integral to the ‘Tre’ part of the name – the other drinks being ale and wine. With floor-to-ceiling windows and salvaged wood tabletops, the décor is simple, rustic, but elegant – much like the menu, which features fresh pastas, a charcuterie board and a Red Devil ale sausage for which I’d really like to return.
I’m served a caffe macchiato and I photograph the pretty leaf design in the foam. Sitting across from me is Jazelin Maskos, a coffee aficionado and Pedaler-guide-in-training who will soon be leading the very tour we’re on. I tell her that coffee never seems to be quite hot enough for me. Pretty soon she’s taking me into uncharted coffee territory.
“Ordering an extra hot latte, along with the milk and the sugar, changes the chemical breakdown of the coffee,” she says. That can border on sacrilege if the beans happen to be Ethiopian Tchembe, which apparently has a red wine and blueberry pie aroma, or Guatemalan with its hints of chocolate and raisin.
Cycling through Victoria’s Beacon Hill Park on the Beans and Bites Tour.
A trained barista, Jazelin is part of Victoria’s burgeoning coffee scene. That scene includes ‘barista throwdowns’ in which contestants must prepare espresso, latte/cappuccino art and original drinks in timed performances and be judged on everything from their knowledge and creativity to the taste of their drink.
“Victoria is the best coffee city in Canada,” says Jazelin, without hesitation. For a place with such great beer, that’s fitting, I think to myself. I wolf down some of Tre Fantastico’s excellent banana bread and soon we’re back on the road, cycling through Beacon Hill Park. We briefly ride along Dallas Road and enjoy the ocean breeze before heading inland again to Fernwood. Maybe it’s the cool graffiti or the piercings and tattoos per square foot, but Fernwood feels a bit like East Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, and like Commercial Drive, excellent coffee is here.
The Fernwood Coffee Company is a small roastery and café, serving great locally-sourced food and coffees fine-tuned over numerous samplings. With bikes locked and helmets in hand, we troop into the back of the café with resident barista, Rek Feldman. Surrounded by sacks of beans from Rwanda, Ethiopia, Brazil, Colombia, Nicaragua, Honduras and Costa Rica, Rek serves us some of Fernwood’s Cold Brew. It takes eight hours to brew with ice water through a drip in a glass tower that looks like a science experiment. It tastes unlike any iced coffee I’ve had because it’s not really iced coffee – just cold. As Rek explains, most iced coffee is brewed hot first then left to cool and chilled with ice – diluting the coffee’s flavour and altering its chemical makeup.
Fernwood Coffee’s Rek Feldman.
Fernwood’s Cold Brew tastes sweet even without sugar. For those who like a little bitterness, Rek adds tonic water, which completely alters the flavour and the aroma. It actually smells like lemon or green tea. We finish our visit with an espresso and now, three coffees into the tour, I feel ready to cycle to Nanaimo. Instead we head back downtown to Silk Road, a tea store on Government Street.
Tea expert Emara Angus has our settings arranged at the tasting bar and because there aren’t enough stimulants already coursing through our veins, there’s chocolate paired with each tea. The sight of chocolate almonds, Ecuadorian dark chocolate and Ginger Elizabeth milk chocolate thrills Ryan and Emma, for whom chocolate is an essential ingredient with any hot beverage.
Emara starts us off with Silk Road’s Angel Water tea, a blend of mint, rose, lavender and elderflower. We let it melt the milk chocolate on our tongues and there’s a chorus of “mmmmms”. That’s followed by Japanese sour cherry tea that smells so creamy and is so good with the dark chocolate from Ecuador. We finish with Vanilla Plantation from Sri Lanka, which apparently makes a great chai tea latte and certainly tastes good with chocolate almonds.
Silk Road’s teas are all organic and have won numerous awards. We cycle away with small store bags of tea swinging from our handlebars, but we don’t have far to pedal. Bon Macaron Patisserie on Broad Street is our final stop, which given the level of indulgence on offer here, is probably just as well.
Bon Macaron Patisserie’s David Rousseau with some very versatile pastry. Resistance is futile!
David Rousseau is behind the counter and guiding us through an eclectic mix of flavours available in sweet, bite-size macaroons: curried mango chutney, white chocolate-wasabi, bacon-creamcheese and goat cheese-fig catch our eyes. Prior to this I’d only ever eaten my mum’s coconut macaroons, so I’m somewhat in a state of shock. A tiramisu-salted caramel macaroon helps me recover.
“It’s a very versatile piece of pastry,” says David, who makes about 1,000 macaroons a day and clearly enjoys inventing new flavours. (He was busy making a bacon-maple syrup batch for Father’s Day.)
Thankfully it’s a short ride back to The Pedaler and even shorter walk to The Parkside. We agree that Victoria reminds us of one of our other favourite weekend getaways – Portland, Oregon: cool people doing innovative things with food and drink in stylish settings.
Must get back for that beer tour though!
If you go:
The Beans and Bites tour leaves daily from The Pedaler on 719 Douglas St. at 9 a.m. and 1:30 p.m. It costs $79 per person. Also on offer is the Hoppy Hour guide to Victoria’s brewing scene ($79; leaves daily at 1:30 p.m.) and Castles, Hoods and Legends, a tour of Victoria’s historic neighbourhoods and landmarks. Visit www.thepedaler.ca or call 778-265-RIDE (7433).
Victoria’s Parkside Hotel and Spa is a short walk from the Royal B.C. Museum. It offers a family package from $179 a night, including family admission to the museum, two-hour rental of the hotel’s private movie theatre, plus a snack basket with pop, popcorn and candy. Call 1-866-941-4175 or visit parksidevictoria.com.
B.C. Ferries offers numerous summer package deals to Vancouver Island, including a Victoria Getaway from $109 per person, based on double occupancy. The package comprises one night at the Chateau Victoria Hotel, round-trip ferry from Vancouver for two adults and a car, plus complimentary parking. For more information on this and other deals, visit bcferries.com/vacations or call 1-888-BC FERRY.
For all other matters-Victoria, visit tourismvictoria.com
Whistler celebrates readers and writers
Sunshine Coast filmmaker Nicolas Teichrob appears at the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, Oct. 12-14.
A comfy bed and a good book sound like the perfect antidote to the chilly onset of fall, but organizers of the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival have something less solitary in mind.
From Oct. 12-14, the resort will showcase the art of storytelling with a celebrated lineup of Canadian and international authors. Panel discussions, workshops, and speaking events make up the festival, which also pairs authors with wine and jazz at a Saturday-night gala to be held at the Chateau Fairmont Whistler. The Squamish Lil’Wat Cultural Centre will host the festival’s opening night reception.
Whistler’s festival events have an intimate feel, say organizers, who add that booklovers can interact and connect with top authors from all over North America.
Festival headliner, Alistair MacLeod.
Headlining is Canadian author, Alistair MacLeod, best known for his critically acclaimed collection of short-stories Island as well as his multiple award-winning novel No Great Mischief. Lawrence Hill, author of the international best-seller and prize winning The Book of Negroes will be there, along with short-story author and journalist Zsuzsi Gartner (Better Living Through Plastic Explosives). Also speaking will be young adult writer Susan Juby (Alice, I Think, The Woefield Poultry Collective); non-fiction and fiction writer Margaret Macpherson (Nellie McClung: Voice for the Voiceless, Body Trade); historical fiction novelist, Jack Whyte (A Dream of Eagles, The Templar Trilogy); fiction and poetry writer Miranda Hill (Sleeping Funny) and celebrated poet John Burnside(Black Cat Bone). Local author and festival director Stella Harvey will be releasing her new book, Nicolai’s Daughters.
In 2001, Harvey founded the Whistler Writers Group, otherwise known as The Vicious Circle.
“Our first festival was 20 people in my living room,” laughs Harvey. “We had a guest author – Andreas Schroeder – and a workshop the following day. We were finished by 4:30!”
Harvey invited the poet, novelist and Roberts Creek resident, Schroeder, back for the festival’s 10th anniversary. Another Sunshine Coast resident, Nicolas Teichrob, will appear at this year’s festival. The filmmaker will be part of a panel discussion on writing and film on Oct. 14.
Festival founder, Stella Harvey.
The Whistler Writers Group now has about 150 members and has seen its annual festival grow to a three-day event, attracting internationally acclaimed writers and about 300 participants last year.
But, says Harvey, the festival has lost none of its intimacy.
“One of the things we hear most in evaluations by guests and authors is that intimacy is a great strength of the festival. The fact that you can share lunch or a coffee with the authors and hear about the books they like, or what their motivations are, is definitely appreciated.”
Saturday night’s “Wine, Books and Jazz” event at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler is a first for the festival, says Harvey, who hopes it will be another way to cultivate that intimacy. “It will be a pub-like setting and a chance to share a drink with authors while listening to good music.”
The New Orleans Ale Stars take the stage with swing-era jazz from 7:30 p.m.
In partnership with the Fairmont Chateau Whistler, the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival is offering “Book and Bed” packages. The full “Book and Bed” package starts at $658 and includes two full event passes (entry to 14 events over the festival weekend) for the festival plus accommodation for two nights, based on two sharing.
For more information, visit www.theviciouscircle.ca and http://www.fairmont.com/whistler/special-offers/other-offers/readers-writers-festival/, or call 1 800 606-8244.
The Fairmont Chateau Whistler hosts the Whistler Readers and Writers Festival, Oct. 12-14.
Nev Judd: Online and out there 