Well here I am, sitting on the nice comfy fold-out (in case anyone wants to visit and needs a place to crash? Hint hint family...) in front of the fireplace of our beautiful Silver Rock condo, watching Ghostbusters. We’ve been living in Fernie for almost a week. And I mean LIVING. Clothes put away, fridge stocked with groceries, and more importantly, beer, toothbrushes in toothbrush holders, Crystal the car happily stowed away in undercover, heated carparking. We managed to completely luck out with this amazing condo, and our landlady is really nice and knows the town and all the hotspots to check out. We came into Fernie really late Monday night, I’m talking 9:30pm, but Deb was happy to meet us and show us the condo. We thought we’d just have a quick look and be off down the road to the motel for the night but everything just worked. As soon as we walked through the door, we felt we were home. It was so nice and huge (the smaller bedroom is probably as large as our old B Block unit) and fitted out with everything we could ever need. Deb must have thought we came across as nice, clean, friendly Australians (and why wouldn’t we?) and she offered for us to move in that night.

After some squealing on mine and Robyn’s part, we calmed down enough to realise that we needed a beer to celebrate our moving into our sweet pad. Robyn and Adam went off in search of an open bottleshop and Zane and I took the time to finally unpack our lives after 2 weeks of living in a suitcase. This was our new home.

Since then, we’ve been having nice little walks to check out the town of Fernie, I’ve joined the library, we’ve found a great coffee and bagel shop, we’ve done a big grocery shop and we’ve been really good, eating at home most nights.

Our one big night out in town started very innocently, as it always does. We decided we’d do a pub crawl as such, only a professional one, as we wanted to scope the bars and see where we might want to work. So off we went, starting at the Brickhouse where we thought we would sample the local brews. With such names as “What the huck” Huckleberry wheat ale, “Pumpkin Head” dark ale and “Ole Willy” Belgian Ale, how could we resist? Well, I wish we had. They weren’t much to write home about. We continued onto another pub and had a few more pitchers of whatever was on special. We also had poutine, which is a fat-tastic combination of French fries, gravy and curds, like melted cheese. It was quite delicious. We thought we’d finish off, by having a few bevs in the hostel bar, where Zane and I continued our winning streak in pool. And I wasn’t there just to make up the numbers, I can proudly say that I sunk a few balls and even sunk the winning black in a few of the games. I love how there’s that level of drunkenness where your pool skills seem to increase for a small amount of time.

We then headed home, Robyn and Adam actually sprinting, as Robyn was in the unfortunate position of needed to pee. It’s really cold over here, jumping behind a hedge would probably result in frostbitten genitals and that just wouldn’t be fun. As a matter of fact, once when we were walking home in Jasper, Adam alluded to needed a pair of tweezers to assist in locating his genitals in order to urinate. It’s really cold in Canada. So those two crazy kids ran off and Zane and I followed in a more leisurely pace. Obviously we just couldn’t just call it a night so down we went to try out the hot tub. It is quite a unique thing to sit in a pool of water over 40 degrees Celsius, while around you, your beers are keeping frosty in around -5 degrees Celsius.

On Friday night we headed out to see the local Ice Hockey team the Ghostriders take on the team from Kimberley. They were victorious of course and it was such a fun game. I’ve always been quite a passive, anti-violence person but I couldn’t help myself and soon enough I was cheering on the biffs like everyone. At one stage, after a particularly impressive fight, a player got sent off, not before showing off his blood nose to the crowd and ensuring he was escorted off amidst a raucous cheer and a few sprays of blood. It was a great atmosphere and we could get beers at the game and we met some locals, fun night all round.

The past couple of days we’ve been doing interviews for jobs up on the mountain. We all went up on the first day to lock in interviews for the following days for specific job positions. Robyn had her interviews that day, she applied for a job in Guest Services and another one where she would have to start at 5am to leave bright, chirpy messages outlining the snow conditions for the day. Needless to say, she’s leaning more towards Guest Services. Zane and I had our interviews today, for roles in Food and Beverage, and now it’s just a matter of hearing how we went. Adam was really prepared, with no resume and seemingly, no inclination to even fill out the application form. He’s just a lucky bugger though. We could have all picked it, and sure enough, he came home today from his interview with a job at the rental shop, even thought the rest of us had been told we’d have to wait until the end of the week to hear about our fate. Typical Adam.

The wage most of us a looking at getting for our jobs up on the mountain is $8.50 an hour. Oh the riches. Given that, Robyn and I have been offering our services as babysitters. Together we looked after an 11-month-old on Saturday night. It started off really well. About two minutes after the parents left Robyn and I were playing with him and Robyn innocently gave him a little nudge to push him over towards me. He face-planted the wooden floor and there was that instant where you think “Oh he’s alright” but then the screaming started. Being the awesome, full-of-experience babysitter that I am, I laughed a little at the faceplant and then blanched. Crying child. What do I do? Luckily enough, Robyn was more resourceful and quickly occupied him with a toy to play with. Phew, crisis averted. Then, all was well until it was time for the kid to go to sleep. Wow, he had a set of lungs on him. I think he almost blew one of my eardrums while I was walking around with him trying to help him settle. He sure was a screamer. Robyn finally got him settled with some gentle, soothing pats, all the while I was upstairs vowing to never have children much less never babysit a baby again. In the end though, it was good money and the parents really appreciated the night out and maybe I’ll be better with children a bit older, ones that I can communicate with...

So it’s off to Cranbrook tomorrow to get our Social Insurance Number, all very exciting. It’s been snowing up on the hill quite a bit today, raining in town. They say in a few more days it’ll be cold enough in town and we’ll see some snow down here so that’s hugely exciting. I hope it’ll be like in the movies and we’ll just wake up one day and our front lawn will be blanketed in white.

Until it happens though, we’ll just have to wait.

Much snow-searching love, Z and T.