Thursday, January 8, 2009

Hitting the road on Christmas day

Squamish, Mount Garibaldi, The Chief and Shannon Falls from the Sea to Sky Highway
Watercolour with Photoshopped sky (I’d had my usual difficulty with the Prussian Blue wash)

©2009 Charlene Brown



We planned to spend Christmas with our daughter’s family in Squamish, at the north end of Howe Sound. It’s on the spectacular Sea to Sky Highway about midway between Vancouver and Whistler, the venues for the 2010 Winter Olympics. We’d had a huge amount of snow, but on December 23 the roads had been cleared and we made it to Squamish before it started snowing again. Like most Victorians, however, we don’t actually have winter tires on the car, and Squamish got another 15 cm of snow by Christmas Eve – so, although Christmas dawned clear and bright, when we heard that another 20 cm was expected, we fled south as soon as the highway was cleared. Not only did we get all the way home without any difficulty, we set a new record – 3 hours and 40 minutes – for the trip, which included downtown Vancouver and a 95-minute ferry ride!
I took lots of pictures, and hope to do a series of paintings of the Whistler area and the road to it between now and the start of the Olympics. Not right away though – I have other projects, like the Egypt pictures, I’d like to work on first.