10 Nov, Fri - Rockies Day 1, Golden

Day 1 Rockies Tour

We had to meet at Canada Place, Vancouver at 8.15am on Friday to board the coach. And due to the "interesting" experience we had in our temporary accommodation, all of us only used the toilet, in the Convention Place in Vancouver, to brush our teeth and wash our faces.

We only left at 8.45am as someone was late. Then we had a mini break at a Shell Petrol Kiosk. We were heading to Golden and on our way, it was snowing. There was a snow storm and everybody was driving carefully. Then we took a lunch break at Aberdeen Mall. It was huge and the shopping centre seems so much better than those in Victoria.

The bus ride to Golden was long, it was more than 8 hours but we had several toilet stops in between so it was still bearable. However, our view along the ride was marred by rain and fog. No good pictures were taken. But we saw snow on the later trip and it got all of us excited because we seemed to have arrived in winter wonderland.

We finally reached Golden around 6pm and got settled into our hotel, Sportsman Lodge. Then we headed out to get food and walked around Golden a little. There wasn't really much to see as the place seems like a "stop-for-break, stay the night" place. During this trip, we were supposed to spend very little on food. So all of us got 2 loafs of bread to survive for this 4 days 3 night trip. We brought jam and peanut butter to spread on our bread. I wanted to save money and intended to only eat jam-peanut butter bread for the whole trip. But I failed, I ended up buying a double cheeseburger at Golden as I needed meat.

4 of us were taking the Entrepreneur Course and we had a test on Thursday. We were supposed to study on the bus but we didn't really study really hard for it. We ended up sleeping or watching the tv movie.

We had to stay in groups of 4. So jt and lince stayed with 2 other mexican people. And cheryl, jo, becky and I stayed together. It was so funny as the NTU people stayed together and the SMU people stayed in another room, and we didn't plan this arrangment. Jt's side could enter into a small kitchen as the hotel's staff didn't lock the door. The kitchen was so cool, it had a stove, pots and pans, toaster. So I stayed there for a while to boil water and also to read my notes. However, the water wasn't exactly cooked as there were white residue. Probably because the water was hard. Anyway, we had a relatively early night as all of us were tired from the long journey.