Our second day in Whistler found your traveling baby boomers hiking into the village to enjoy breakfast with Vanessa Murphy (Whistler Convention and Visitors Bureau) from our very comfy night’s stay at the Fairmont Chateau Whistler.

As we were hoofin’ it to the village, we encountered a couple of black bears foraging for their own breakfast that stalled our brisk pace a bit.

Someone mentioned to us that black bears in Whistler are as common as squirrels in other places.  If you give them a wide birth they will go on about their own business and pay you no attention.

We did give this guy a wide birth as he strolled around like he owned the place.

After a wonderful breakfast at Elements (awesome Eggs Benedict) we strolled around the village of Whistler, which as you can see from the photograph above, was host to the 2010 Winter Olympic Games.

The village is filled with specialty shops, ice cream stores, candy stores, hiking & skiing stores, and just above everything to make a baby boomer woman’s heart go pitter-pat.

Carol was drawn like a magnet to a local shop called Ruby Tuesday where local artisans display their jewelry and fashion accessories.  She walked out with a smile, a new scarf, and some new jewelry.

We’ll tell you more about this later, but we spent the bulk of our day enjoying majestic and surreal views aboard the Whistler Blackcomb Peak to Peak Gondola experience.

Two separate chair lifts took us to the top of Blackcomb Mountain where we boarded a gondola which transported us from the peak of Blackcomb to the peak of Whistler mountain.  Absolutely stunning views!

Well, that’s it for today.  We have much more to share about Whistler, but we will do it in our feature post when we return home to the US.

Tomorrow, we’re off to Vancouver where we will spend the next two days in a conference of travel bloggers, writers, journalists, and PR folks called The Travel Bloggers Exchange (TBEX ’11).

Stay tuned for more from western Canada.  We’ll soon be boarding the Rocky Mountaineer for a luxury train ride to Jasper in the Canadian Rockies!