Snow, hard work again, honeymoon

Our last holiday until our honeymoon has just happened, and as most of you will already know from emails, Facebook and Twitter, it was an incredible four days spent at Mount Ruapehu, snowboarding, eating, drinking, snowboarding, and generally not being at work. This last bit was good, as it's been a fairly intense three months (only three months!!) and I was beginning to fear a little bit of burnout approaching.

So, for those of you who're not in New Zealand, Mount Ruapehu is an active volcano in the North Island, about four and a half hours' drive from Auckland on a good day. We were boarding at Turoa, and staying in Ohakune, about 20 minutes' drive down the hill and a genuinely lovely little town. The mountain's profile might be recognisable to some as Mount Doom from Lord of the Rings - it's more covered in snowboarders in real life.

To save a bit of time, we headed to Hamilton on Wednesday night, to stay with the Kiwi's sister and other half, which shortened the morning's drive by an hour or so and provided a great lasagne courtesy of the younger Kiwi. Stupidly early on Thursday we headed south, and some time after breakfast we could spot the mountain in the distance. We were on the hill by mid-morning, my initial nerves about having forgotten how to do it long gone by the end of the first run. That said, it was only December we were in Whistler.

Thursday was good - Friday was better. The snow was some of the best I've seen in all my three snowboarding trips; as good as Whistler at its best. They'd had 10cm on the Wednesday, and the perfect balance of clear, sunny days, cool temperatures and cold nights ensured it stayed deep and soft until we left. Saturday was good, but busy - obviously word had spread and the world and his dog had made the trip to the mountain. Sunday we managed a good breakfast before making an unhurried journey back home through stunning scenery.

Work, which we temporarily escaped, is intense. I can't speak for the Kiwi, although I know she's mentally busy, but for my part the pace and strain are fantastic. I've just convinced the business to hire another member of staff to support me, which should help, and with another project workstream about to kick off I'll need it, I think. Development is moving slowly even so, which is a bit of a concern as I'm burning through my credibility with every extra dollar I spend without showing a result. Hopefully I've built up enough of it to last another six weeks or so.

As for the last point - we have booked our honeymoon finally. Torn between heading from a southern hemisphere summer to the UK in February, and going to a beach not far from here, we chose the latter. We're going to Aitutaki, a tiny island north of Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands. Following a long time without any time off, and a wedding to boot, I think a week spent on a beach doing as close to nothing as possible will be just the thing.

End phase two...

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.