So Gord and I start to prepare for our trip. We purchase a case of instant noodles and collect our ski gear. We also each shell out for a twofour of rye and 6 bottles of coke. The rye was split equally into the bottles and we were ready to go. Oh... did I mention it was a licensed bus? That's right a bus FULL of people doing pretty much nothing but drinking. Over the course of a single bus trip I personally put away 4 of those bottles, while spending the entire time walking up and down the bus talking to everyone. The basic Shpielh was, "Hi, I'm Jeff, I'm here with Action Flight and we're doing a promotional video for Downhill Riders, if you want to be on it, or don't want to be in it let me or the guy with the camera know, and we'll do whatever you want. We're looking for anyone willing to do something crazy, big air, big dives everything." Of course over time it came out more like, "HI, I'm Sjeff, Aim here with... Ahction Flighttt" etc etc.
Anyways, I made a couple of friends... or they humored the drunk guy. In any event, everyone was talking to me asking all the relevant or irrelevant questions that I had... NO IDEA about. This was my second DHR trip ever, and they were treating me like I was the tour guide, probably because I was the one who was talking to them. Needless to say I was pretty innebriated by the time we finally rolled into town (town being Calgary) and it only go worse from there. It was a pretty good bus ride. Along the way it was universally decided that I looked a lot like Kyle from road trip... that comes up later.
Anyways, we arrived at Fernie and we're directed to our rooms, I'm carrying 1 bag, 2 backpacks and a full set of ski gear, plus what's left of my booze. We make it to our room and find out that... well that we're in a lock off. Basically we have 2 beds, 2 feet of walking space, a bathroom and a TV. That's it. We also have a door in our wall that leads into the room next to us, and they're rampaging already... bang bang bang on the door, they unlock their side, we unlock our side and there's a hello followed by a closed door. We lock our side, but their side remains unlocked.
Thirty seconds later we hear them all pile out of their room off to some party. We thought about it for a second, then popped the door back open and yelled, "HEEEEELLOOOOOOO?" Nothing, Gord grabbed the camera and in we went. They had 3 bedrooms, a full kitchen TV, fireplace, upstairs and everything. Fridge was full of beer, and the freezer full of ice and hard liquor. I was looking around when I heard Gord making tracks for the door... he'd heard someone coming back and was on his way to ditch me. Just then Willy walked in through the front door. Gord was in halfway to the door, and I was still in the kitchen, Willy was RIGHT "messed", so drunk he didn't know what was going on. So we grabbed him and headed into the kitchen.
I threw an arm around his shoulder and did this. "So, we just broke into this *Gord pans around the room* room and this guy caught us. This is Willy." That doesn't sound quite right but you get the idea. Basically he was so drunk it didn't matter what we did. We chatted for a bit, then hopped back into our room through the door. We locke dour side, but Willy didn't lock his side. That door remained unlocked from their side the whole weekend. Idiot's.
So Sat we skied all day, no one really cares about that, suffice to say there was a good foot of powder over the entire mountain, and where we spent our time there was even more. We managed to avoid pulling a Sonny Bono, with the joke "Tree, WHOAH, Tree, WHOAH, Tree, WHOAH, Tree, Tree, Grandma?" Becoming the catch phrase of the day. Afterward we were shuttled back to the hotel to clean up and get changed for the party.
After a brief discussion it was decided that we wouldn't get tooo drunk that night as we had important filming to do. So I quickly downed my last two Rye and Coke's and we headed over to the preparty with the tour guides. I got to meet every one of them and had a great time there with a nice little buzz going. On our way out we heard someone scream, "WHAT?"
We quickly followed that up with a "WHAT???"
Responses being "OKAY!!"
YEYEAH!!"
And we were at a new party, this one had absinthe, and I was the face guy. So I'm walking around talking to these guys who are so drunk that I couldn't see... wait, they couldn't see? I don't care, they were drunk! DRUNK! So, anyways, like I was saying, I'm at this party, and there's absinthe, the real stuff, 70% absinthe and I ended up doing three shots with the guys there, and not 3 correct shots where you melt sugar in a spoon, stir it in and then half fill the shot glass with water, we just filled the shot glass and went. Meanwhile there's a bunch of people stumbling around this random hotel room and Gord's filming us.
For a quick count at this point in the space of an hour I've had 3 shots of absinthe, 1/3 of a twofour of rye, and a beer with the tour guides. Weeeee, so much for staying semi-sober. We're getting on the bus now.
So, when we left from Edmontont there were about 15 buses, each with 40 people, every single one of those people was at the New Years party, and I knew a bunch of them. I spent most of my time talking to the 40 people from our bus wandering from table to table chatting up the people. Everywhere that I stopped I got another drink, I had two cups the whole night, one was for beer which was on tap, the other was for champagne, two hours of constant refills.
Sometime around 11:30 I had this drunken epiphany, it's New Years, we need kiss pictures, so I made up a new shpiel, "HIII, Iam sJeff, I'm here with... Actionflight, and we're doing this video... I'm collecting Newyears, Kisses for the video." Needless to say I have about 40 pictures of couples kissing, and I got a fair number for myself.
At 1:00AM the buses were headed back to the hotels and I was headed for the buses. Along the way there was a guy... in a girls shirt, and I don't mean like a tight girls shirt I mean one of those low cut shiny silver sparkly thin shoulder strap things and he was there with his GF. So of course I had to take a picture, while I'm taking this pic I hear from the back of the bus, "DUDE YOU'RE SO "procreating" GAY!!!"
What does one do when faced with this assertion? There's a couple of options, my personal choice was to blow him a kiss. This was apparently a mistake. As I was turning around I got punched in the back of the head, then in the cheek and the mouth. WoW, good thing I was drunk because it didn't really hurt that much. Guy in the girls shirt stepped up and stepped in while I was trying to figure out where I was. Things got calmed down, and I made a point of getting his name afterwards and he'll not be on another Downhill riders trip
I spent most of the next day in bed sleeping. I didn't have much of a hang over, but I definately wasn't about to pay $50 to go skiing. The pub crawl wasn't bad, had a beer and took some cool pics with the tour guides, one of the tour guides runs around with garden gnome all the time, he has his own ski passes and everything, it was pretty funny. Skiing Monday was great and getting home that night to a nice hot shower was even better. Tuesday I woke up soooo sick, it turns out that alcohol does kill bacteria, however the ones that survive come back with a vengeance, I was sick for fully three weeks, and within the first week I had completely lost my voice.
Anyways, that's the short version.
