Whistler revisited

Thursday dawned dry, bright and clear, which was great as another chaplain and I were due to head up to Whistler for the day. This would be my second visit but this one was a mixture of work and play - although it was a day off for both of us, part of the reason for going up was to visit the Whistler Athletes' village so that we could compare and contrast it to the Vancouver one, as well as meet with the chaplaincy team up there.
Despite an early start, the glorious weather meant that the journey along the coastal 'sea to sky' route was wonderful - the very brief glimpses of splendour and beauty that I'd seen through the rain and low cloud last Saturday were but a foretaste of the glorious scenery I saw on the same route today - a mix of sea, greenery, mountains, snow, glaciers, lakes and waterfalls. What a wonderful start to a day!
The Whistler Paralympic Athletes' Village is larger than Vancouver's, and nestles in the shadow of tree-lined and snow-topped mountains. The residential buildings are built in a traditional local style, but apart from them and a couple of other buildings, everything else is housed in temporary tented structures. Not that you'd know they were tents when inside them, as they are large and very strong. Someone said that the one housing the polyclinic designed and built along the same lines as those which house large medical facilities used by the armed forces in places such as Afghanistan etc. The Multi-Faith Centre is smaller and more compact than the Vancouver one, but is housed within a 'Residents' Centre' which means that it is in a building naturally visited by athletes, unlike the Vancouver one; so both pluses and minuses there. In addition to catching up with Carolyn, it was good to meet most members of the chaplaincy team there, including a chaplain whom I first met and worked with in Berlin last year. I felt like I already knew them as we've seen each other's names on the rota and have been praying for each other, but it was good to meet in the flesh.
After this visit, we headed into Whistler itself, and took the opportunity to go up Whistler Mountain in a gondola - the scale of the mountains can be envisaged by the fact that this journey was a full 15 minutes long. We then took a trip across the valley to the top of Blackcomb Mountain on the Peak2Peak gondola. This is a 2.75mile journey which includes the world's longest unsupported span of 1.88miles! It is also the highest lift of its kind in the world at 436 metres above the valley floor. A third world record is claimed by it being the longest continuous lift system on the globe. These facts, plus the grandeur of the mountains and spectacular surrounding scenery and the glorious weather mean that superlatives abound - reinforced by the fact that we made the return journey in a glass-bottomed gondola! Awesome is one word used to describe it all - it certainly very loudly speaks of a wonderful Creator God.
One 'side effect' of the fact that those of us connected with the Paralympics tend to spend the whole time with our accreditation pass hanging around our necks, was that in the queue for and on the Peak2Peak we were able to speak at some length about the work of the Multi-Faith Centre with the 'Chef de Mission' [leader of the delegation] and members of one of the national ski teams competing here, as well as a few other people we encountered. Sadly, I wasn't so bold when I later saw Lord Sebastian Coe standing in the centre of Whistler.....