Isn't technology weird? Here I am in Vancouver airport, happily connected to the gloriously free wi-fi they have here, whilst for some reason Vodafone seem unable to allow me to make or receive calls or text messages whilst I'm here. Bizarre.
Anyway, lack of mobile-ness aside (which hasn't really bothered me tbh), it's been a terrific week. When we arrived on Monday, the temperatures were somewhere around freezing in Whistler village, and we got a fair bit of snow through Tuesday to Friday, which meant that by and large the runs were gorgeous, with snow like icing sugar, tons of dry powder and only the odd bit of treacherously hard ice on the upper slopes. The Peak to Peak Gondola opened on Friday too, linking Whistler and Blackcomb mountains and reducing the time necessary to get from one peak to the other from over an hour to 11 minutes. More of an event for them (it's a big part of their 2010 Winter Olympics things) than for us, but a bit of a diversion nonetheless. After the opening ceremony, we headed across to Blackcomb, where I slid down most of a totally ice-covered run on my back and promptly decided it was time to call it a day.
By Saturday the temperatures were down at around -14C in the village and below -25C on the mountain (plus (or minus?) wind chill), so we managed one long-ish run before our feet froze and we couldn't control our boards properly. The wind made it a bit tricky too, every now and then practically stopping us in our tracks with its force.
Sunday morning we decided we were definitely not going back up, so we went to the pub instead.
My second week of snowboarding has seen me acquire a fresh new array of bruises, although not as many and varied as the first week, in Italy last year. This time it's mostly knees, elbows and arse, and I think that on the whole I fell over a bit less than last time, so who knows, I might be improving. The new board and boots help, definitely, very impressed with both. I managed to whack my head on a particularly hard bit of ice on Thursday too, which has made me think that perhaps a helmet might be in order next time.
The Kiwi also tells me that I've lost some of the deeper, darker lines under my eyes too, ones that apparently had been there for months, so something's going right, I think. I'm sure though, that the next 21 hours' travelling will put them right back there... 3.5 hours to LA, 3 hours in LA, 13 hours to Brisbane... with any luck we'll be able to sleep through most of the last leg.
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