It’s one of the most beautiful highways:

View from the Sea to Sky Highway (April 2015)

but also seems like a fitting description of this past weekend.

Our original plan for the weekend was to do some rainy day sailing. We had made plans with a friend to go out, and all of us were on board with the rain. When we woke up Saturday morning, however, we quickly realized that our plans needed to change. What we thought was just going to be a lot of rain ended up being one of the worst storms to hit BC in a decade (or so I found out afterwards from CBC).

Since sailing in winds up to 90 km/h was not on the table, we decided to spend the afternoon off-roading up by Squamish. We knew we wouldn’t have much for blue skies and sunshine, but there is still something stunning about clouds getting caught on the mountains:

Cloudy day

We were headed up a trail that Alex was familiar with, and had our first stop planned at a waterfall. We were hoping to have a break in the rain to have a bit of a picnic, but since it was raining we decided to let Lenny have a quick run and then keep moving.

Leonard at the waterfall

A short while later, we accepted that our picnic was going to get rained out, and decided to have a tail-gate picnic instead. To be more accurate, Paula and I sat in the front seats and stayed dry while Alex and Lenny put together the picnic in the back and got a bit rained on:

Picnic time!

By the time we had finished eating, the rain had picked up a bit more and we figured it was time to start making our way back down the mountain. Since we were up in the cloud layers, the rain came and went, making for lots of opportunity to stop and appreciate the show that nature was putting on.

Up in the clouds

By the time we had dropped Paula back at her car and made it home (thanks to the power outages, traffic was a nightmare in Vancouver), we were both tired and chilled. It seemed like the perfect excuse to do something we had been dying to try out – having a fire in our miniature wood-burning stove!

Finally!

It’s small (about the size of an old-school mailbox), but makes the boat toasty warm. It was the perfect way to spend a Saturday evening, and is definitely going to help ease the pain of the transition to cooler weather. Well, that and being curled up in bed with this guy!