Kyran and Mercedes Findlater travel the world: Two weeks on the mountain!

Kyran's 2 weeks at Silver Star

Hey folks! Welcome back to another amazing bloggerization by Kyran! Mercedes did the last blog, so check that out if you haven't already - it's about her time in the snow around Madrid and some exploration around the hilly area of Guadalajara.

For my week's entry, I will try to show and tell a little about what it's been like up here on Silver Star mountain.

For my accomodation, the Bulldog Hotel has set aside a nice little condo house thingy for myself and Mercedes, and our little "alcove" bedroom is shown in the picture below. The kitchen and dining area/rest of the house is straight out from the alcove, and off to the left is a closed-in room for the other guy who is living with us. He's just been promoted to Guest Services manager and he's a good bloke! He did the job i'm doing now (Night Audit), last year.

The mountain only just opened up at the end of last week, on Thursday 27th November. Until then, everybody was waiting with bated breath for a big dump of snow - which we got!! The next few pictures show the views around my little condo area, during and after most of the snow dump. We got about a metre of snow in 1 week all up!

Gotta shovel the snow on my steps! This was before the huge dump where the stairs literally turned into a snow ramp, and the whole pathway level was up to the second stair.

Going up to visit work at around 5pm - the schoolbus is there dropping off the kids who live up the mountain, and it's already night time!

The few pics below are after most of the powder dumps, and you can see cars are starting to get snowed in, and the pathways and roads are quite deep in snow now.

Christmas is going to be amazing, look at all the nice big christmas lights on the trees in the village already!

My Job

My first week of work was day time training, going over what i'd have to do at night. My first set of nightshifts (working 10:30pm to 8:30am) went without much of a hitch, and I even got to train the other nightshift person after only my second/third shift myself!

My basic duties as a Night Auditor in the "front desk"/"Guest services" department is to not only be available for random late-night guest issues, but to maintain a bit of security for the hotel during the wee hours of the mornings and also largely to go over the days transactions and make sure it all balances.

The main time is spent preparing reports for housekeeping, maintenance reports, and preparing arrival packages (registration forms + maps + other stuff) for the people arriving that day, so the front desk people have less stress during their day shifts.

The bakers and kitchen staff and one or two maintenance people are usually in as early as 4am so it's not really that lonely.

Oh and when there is snow (which there was plenty on my first few night shifts!) we have to shovel the snow off the stairs and walkways outside, which is fun! *cough*.

During my walkarounds early one morning I found a cute little birds nest with tiny little spotted egg, as shown in the picture below:

I ended up just leaving it there, not sure if someone had put it there on purpose but I couldn't see/hear the mother bird anywhere.

In the afternoon on the way back from a staff meeting at about 3:30pm, this is a nice picture of the area in front of the buildings which have the 10-pin bowling alley in them, and on the other side to the left and down a small slope is the ice-skating pond which is all frozen over now!

Two other random pics, showing a nice sunny day and the pretty alpine trees.

While shopping for groceries in Vernon, went to a liquor store and found a funny named beer that I decided I would try. It was really nice, with added cinnamon.

On the 1st December was the big opening night of the Grand Cafe at the Bulldog Hotel. The first picture below shows how packed it was, and even a local band in the righthand corner. They played plenty of classics! Everyone had a great night and it was a very successful re-opening after the great flood of 2013 which knocked out the cafe for the last 11 months.

All my crazy staff homies at this table, they know how to party!

Food

I love food. I enjoy cooking. And while living essentially by myself, when I cook I do so in order to make lots of food for the following days and freeze them in containers. I usually make stirfry and rice, curry and rice, or pasta with a tomato based sauce with lots of veggies thrown in.

I also manage to get hold of reasonably cheap fresh salad ingredients, and bread is baked at the Bulldog Hotel every day so we can buy very high quality and a good sized loaf for very good rates compared to what is available "cheaply" at the stores in Vernon. You can see a few pics of salads that I've made, and also a fancy salad sandwich.

I've also had a brain fart about how I can have lower energy density foods which are also cheap, and easy to make. I have come to the conclusion that soups are perfect for this, and the last picture is my first attempt at a lentil soup, with peas and corn added with a veggie stock cube thrown in for good measure. It was pretty good!