Paul Romein

Well, the beach certainly was an awesome time!  I splashed around in the canoe, and I got to try out Mary’s inflatable Zodiac kayak!  It was definately interesting!  It was fun to lie and roast in the sun a little, but one can only really take so much of sitting and doing nothing.

After the beach, I drove John to the store to show him my car and its stereo.  Later, I did the same thing with Tom!  They both seemed to like it …  I love my car!

We had a small and swift dinner, and then we went as a group for ice cream.  We unicycled as a group, but an improvpto raced spawned between Tom and I while I was using Vanessa’s small unicycle and it was certainly a challenge that really worked my legs and my cardio!  We came out extremely even speed, but both got some great exercise!  Almost equivalent to a good three hour hike.  After cones, we met at the Rupprecht’s campsite for the fire.  Being the last night for most of the group, we stayed out late socializing.

Each night it seems I’m writing in notepad later and later… each time probably about an hour later.  I guess it’ll help me adjust because I’m driving home tomorrow morning/afternoon.  I’ll probably stop at the internet cafe to post this just before driving home.  I certainly am glad I came out here and wish I could have stayed longer!  I’ve been coming to Shuswap since before I can remember, and it’s definately a welcoming and embracing place to be.

I sit here again in my tent trailer typing in Notepad!  It’s been a very entertaining day today for certain!  This morning I woke up somewhere around 10am – though I can’t be certain because I haven’t been wearing my binary watch.  My parents made up pancakes for breakfast, and shortly after I drove a few minutes down the road from the campsite to a coffee shop that has free WiFi.  I uploaded photos and used VNC to connect to use my home computers.  I attempted to start processing thousands of photos from our dance competition into web format, but I had some bumps in the road.  I also checked my email and chatted a little… I went a little overboard and spent just short of three hours there!

I arrived back at the campsite to find that a bunch of the family had already headed down to the beach because the weather had gotten really sunny!  I got changed and went with my mom to join the group where we played in the water for a while!  It was nice to lay on the beach with the warm sun – it was awesome because it wasn’t too hot or too cold!  The water was even vastly warmer than other years!  I hope to get back down there sometime tomorrow maybe!

After the beach, the family met back at our campsite for a group spaghetti dinner!  Everyone brought either sauce, noodles, salad, or desert, and we all piled together to have a mass grubbin’.  Immediately after dinner, a bunch of unicyclers went out to the street so we could take some photos of our group!  I even got Vanessa up on my 5-foot giraffe unicycle!  The rest of the evening everyone hung around a good five or six hours at our campsite socializing and playing games like O-Hell.  John, Drew and I were even playing around jamming on our guitars (hoorah for Cherry Blossom!) – and I even got to do my very first performance to the song “Cows With Guns“!

http://www.paulromein.ca/blog/wp-content/m_uploads/2008/08/cows_with_guns_performance_640w_400kbps.flv

Anyways, I’m having fun up here, but one thing I miss is having someone roughly my age to hang out with.  The closest on my younger side is probably about 16 or 17, and on the older side is probaly like 30 or older.  Being 21, I’m mostly hanging out with the older crew, but it’s been fun nomatter who I’m talking to!  Family is an important aspect to life, and I’m really enjoying it to its fullest up here!

As I mentioned in my last post, I left town at a reasonable hour… however when I got half-way across the Port Mann bridge, traffic stopped. I took the next exit and followed Fraser Highway parallel to the highway all the way to Langley as per my uncle’s recommendation. It worked nicely, with the exception of some small spurts of construction or whatever. I merged back onto the freeway in Langley, and was extremely disappointed to find traffic crawling at 50km/hr or less. Turns out there was a second accident, this one in Abbotsford.

So after about two hours of fighting traffic in the lower mainland, I finally got out of town and soared north. Brian left Shuswap towards the later end of my traffic extravaganza and we met in Merritt for lunch. My grandpa was riding with Brian so the three of us ate at Tim Hortons. That was about the half-way distance point to Shuswap, but time-wise it was much faster. I will note that I’ve been coming to Shuswap so long that I’ve got the directions memorized, and although I had a set printed to help navigate Kamloops, I didn’t even use it. It was a very awesome drive alone with my tunes!

I arrived at 4:50pm, which was fairly good time, and made my way around the campsites to say hi! Everyone was so welcoming and my stomach was happy too! Thank you Lucy! The kids showed me how they put peanuts on their laps and some squirrels actually crawl up on you and take them. It was quite amusing! We unicycled around a bit, then I had some dinner. After dinner, our convoy made its way over to the park store for ice cream! We had something like two 5-foot unicycles, three regular unicycles, and a half-dozen bicycles. I had a two-scoop: Black Cherry and Cotton Candy!

After we rode home, everyone went over to Tom and Lucy’s campsite for the group campfire. Everyone sat around and chatted and we played games like O-Hell, Mafia, and possibly even some cribbage?

I forgot my toothbrush.

I’m currently sitting back in the tent-trailer typing in notepad while I hear some super loud firecrackers nearby being really annoying. I’ll copy and past this to my blog as soon as I can, and hopefully upload all my photos at the same time!

Posted May 25, 2007 at 2:50pm

Greg, Jason and I piled into Sheila, and we drove down the Sea to Sky highway for our second day in a row. Jason came along to take photos, much like the ones you see here!

We went to Squamish to hike what they call “The Chief“. It’s one of those hikes that I’ve been meaning to do for a while, but have never gotten around to doing.

Above, is a shot of the entrance of the trail from the base campground. The first steps are to hustle up this rock. Next you get to run of a long set of stairs that you can see to the right, and it’s fairly easy.

There are three peaks, and it’s neat beacuse you can see each peak from the other. We left a little late so we didn’t have enough time to do all of them, and we only ended up doing the second peak, beacuse Jason claimed it was the best. I took a 22 photos from the top and used a UBC-crafted program to stitch them together to build this 360 degree photo below with no effort! I strongly reccomend it!

Scroll Across the 360 degree panoramic shot!

Also, here’s a bunch of other shots from the top:

It was pretty much as I would imagine the Chief to be – about a 5 hour round trip, with a good steep slope, and over 600m vertical from base to peak.

Here’s a few more random hiking shots:

After an hour ride home, I had a quick shower before Megan took a razor to my hair! She sliced off my winter doo and now I’ve got shorter hair! The plan is to cut is shorter so that I can have it stick out from under the hat slightly in two weeks or so. It’s different – but I like it!

I wore it to comedy and it was well recieved. We had some great laughs and later we headed over to the pub! Later, we noticed Brad and Jeff from Table 23 across the pub, so we ordered them each a shot of water!

Posted May 27, 2007 at 12:32am

When I am really excited about going to do something, I usually wake up a little before my alarm clock goes off. This morning, I woke up a whole hour before my alarm went off! It took me about 20 minutes of lying there awake before I got myself up and got ready to leave. I packed up some stuff, and crammed Mark’s bike into the back of the Subaru. By 7:20 I left the house with my mom and I dropped her off at the West Coast Express station. I remember one thing she asked me right before she got out was “did you put on any sun-screen?”, and I replied “I’ve got enough safety gear stuff on that there’s no skin showing so I couldn’t even get a burn if I wanted to!”

I got to Greg’s by 7:45 and we stalled there for an hour or so while he installed his new hydraulic brakes that cost somewheres around 400 bucks! Apparently that doubles the worth of his bike! When he was all done, we had to take off a wheel of each bike to fit it all into my Subaru.

We drove there with only three small breaks:

1. getting pulled over by a cop for a speeding ticket
2. Tim Hortons in Squamish for iced cap supreme’s and breakfast sandwich’s, and
3. gas a few minutes down the road after Timmy’s

We arrived roughly an hour and a bit after the mountain opened, and it took us until just after noon to get up the hill. I had to learn how to put on all the gear, and Greg had to zap strap his new brake cable’s down.

Keep in mind that this is my first time, ever, mountain biking. Not just up at Whistler, but I haven’t even rode a mountain bike since mine broke down over 7 years ago. I’ve rode my BMX for probably 8 years now, but only mostly in the summers up at Shuswap as of recently. And even then, I’ve been riding the unicycle more and more. One thing that I think helped me the most was my snowboarding mentality of giving it 100%, because I didn’t do nearly as shabby as I thought I might.

Our first two runs were on the blue run called “B-Line”, which I did fairly well. So to up it a little bit, Greg led me onto a black run called “A-Line” which we did twice before moving onto a different black run called something like the “Pirate something”, which was an extremely narrow path, and a super muddy ground! At the bottom of the mountain, there are three big drops, and Greg has been struggling to do the biggest one for ever now, but I let him lead me off the middle sized one – and I landed it no problemo! Following that crazy run, I allowed Greg to take me next onto a double black run which led into another double black which I think led into a third double black! By 3/4′s of the way down, I was so physically exhausted that I had to get off the bike and sit down for a while. Also, I began to notice that my front brake had roughly a centimetre more of travel towards the handlebar, which made it slightly more difficult because it didn’t have as much feather as they call it. After a short rest, we finished the run. Lastly, we went up and finished on the “A-Line” run, and I gave it pretty good! I was really getting into it by the end. At the bottom, I did that medium sized jump once again – there’s a shot I found online of someone else doing it on the right of here!

We washed down our bikes, and some little girl spraying down hers near me, accidentally sprayed me in the face a few times and never even noticed she did it. We left right away, as we had to get home pretty soon. When we got back to the car, we discovered that Greg’s window was left down entirely, and to our extreme luck, nothing was even touched inside the car! I had left the little video camera and my wallet in the glove box, and my change of clothes on the seat right there – some other leftover gear and some red-bull in the back. Nothing was taken, or even touched! Super insane luck was on our side!

The ride home was a good hour and a half to get us to Greg’s for 6:45pm, when we had planned to be home for 5:30. We were pretty addicted to riding. Back at Greg’s, we met up with Mark and Jason Pelley for a film meeting. Due to the small turnout because everyone was busy, we sat down instead of actually going out and filming stuff, and had a good and solid discussion.

When I got home around 10 or so, I couldn’t help but head right back out with Brian to go play box soccer with Mark, Nagle, Fader, and Petrin. There was also a new guy there who accidentally elbowed me in the nose, giving me a killer nose bleed! I was so exhausted from the biking and the past few days of activity that I wasn’t much help on the team – but I had fun!

I can’t thank Mark enough for lending me one of his bikes and all the gear! It was pretty much as much fun as I thought it would be, plus quite a bit more! The biggest fear for me is that I will actually get into it sometime and spend a bundle of money on it.