Stephen and I went to Sunshine yesterday to get our slide on. We
have Fortress passes, but the
opening has been pushed back a few times due to regulatory things and
other holdups. I wanted to go boarding this week, since I'm not
working, and Sunshine currently has
the best snow in the region. Not that it really mattered, since I
mostly did the same green run over and over. I fell down a lot, and
resolved that my next snowboarding purchase shall be a helmet.
The bad thing about going this week was the number of people
there. The road up to the parking lot from #1 was solid traffic,
moving at between 0 and 15 km/h. I'm not exaggerating. It took about
half an hour to drive 7 km. We even considered turning around, but we
sucked it up and parked near the back of the lot. Lunch was burgers at
Bruno's pub, since my sandwiches were in a locker and Stephen forgot
his in the car. The pub was so packed that we asked to share a table
with someone, which turned out to be good because we met some nice
people from the U.K.
Stephen helped me out with the boarding, telling me to transfer my
weight and lean into turns, and to twist my body around to make the
turns happen. Finally I started to get it, and I improved noticeably
over the course of the day. Riding the lifts into the snow, I
discovered that I needed goggles. I put on the cycling sunglasses,
which helped there, but I discovered that I tended to breath on them
and fog them up very quickly while actually boarding. Well, more like
while I was crashing. Once the sun started to go down, I found I
couldn't see very much definition in the snow... the rose lenses I had
in are supposed to help with that a bit, but between the moisture and
the fleece fuzz, they were pretty much useless. Goggles must therefore
be aquired.
Sunshine has a nice ski-out, vaguely following the gondola
route. It was quite crowded, and I fell down a lot, but we managed to
make it to the Goats eye mountain gondola station without getting run
over. There, we were informed that the rest of the ski out was quite
icy, so I decided to take the gondola the rest of the way down, and
Stephen continued down the ski-out. Stephen said I would have had a
hard time on the ski-out, my taking the gondola was the right thing to
do. I was on the gondola with an expert skier and his family. He
complained loudly about beginner snowboarders stopping in the middle
of runs, that they should get out of the way immediately, which is hard
to do when you are dazed from a crash and your legs are attached
together. People standing about talking in the middle of a black run
is rude, but on a green run one has to expect newbies falling down all
over the place. Isn't the person above supposed to avoid obstacles?
By the time we got back to the car, it was pretty much dark and the
traffic out was almost as bad as when we came in. We went and got some
coffee and waited it out. All in all, a good trip, but I definitely
need a helmet.
Spellchecking reveals that I spell goggles g-o-o-g-l-e-s.
