To sum up the ski-trip, well it was bloody awesome. I won't give you a day-by-day account, because if you would like intimate details, then you should have come yourself.

I kind of made a sarcastic remark in my last post about the glorious experiences depicted in photos taken from the Mt. Hotham website, and that they are far from the real deal. My mistake! Four out of our five days were exactly like those pictures. Sure, most of us are not quite as skilled, but as far as the snow and weather go; we had four sunny days with clear blue skies and temperatures as high as 11 degrees. Weather like this all in one week is quite rare and we were pretty lucky. The last day we had a bit of cloud and wind, making it a bit more chilly on some of the slopes.

We stayed in Bright, meaning we had the flexibility of going to either Mt. Hotham or Falls Creek, depending on the weather forecast. It is about a 1.5 hour drive each morning up the mountain, to either resort. The first three days we went to Hotham as the weather was just beyond good. It was actually hot, like time-to-ski-naked-hot (at least for some... you'll see). The majority of people hadn't skied before, let alone seen snow, which made it even more exciting for them. Only about 6/7 guys decided to snowboard the rest tackled the slopes on two planks.

Here are some pics from both Monique's camera and my own:


Very first pic after we just got on the coach at school


Me presenting SA landscape


It's okay, he can't help it


Bill thinks he is Spiderman, but nobody else thinks that


Enough thermals already


Jason chilling on the top bunk


Tom checking me out


OMG SNOW!!


Going up the mountain


Chain fitting= time consuming


Awesome view


Burr, Head, Bartold, Bishop and Filander!


This is the beginner group, notice how I'm not in it


Slee goes for a jump...


and does a fatal stack


The Summit run at Hotham


Slee, Pat, Odlum, Toohey, Mon, Adrian, Instructor, Sophie, Remes and Ms Burrrrr it's cold in here..


Rachel at the Roadrunner quad lift


Is that Rachel next to that pole?


The Orchard runs, very popular among us





Girls at Hotham


Sarah with a snowplough tuck


Which ended in tears and a mouthful of snow.


Moving on


What's with the arm thing


What can I say...


Best dress goes to Mr Filander's purple outfit


Ok, there are just some people that SHOULD NOT take their shirt off and you are one of them. Aaah childhood obesity.


Fully sick action shot of Melick


Melick looking pro


Blood is good


It may look as though she is going fast. But she's actually standing still.


Snow romance


Niice


Not so niice


Matt finally giving up his camera shyness


The year 12s onboard after the last day of skiing


Bill's hair experiments. Good thing the cricket's on


Bill's paperplane engineering


Amy got a birthday cake. Good for her


Go team. This is when our bus gave faulty signals and we had to get on another one


Oh god. Now everyone knows

Skiing was great. I was a bit rusty to begin with, but then it slowly started coming back to me and by the end of the week most of us were doing black runs and even doing parallel turns. We had lessons on most mornings, meaning we had a free afternoon to go where ever we wanted. On the Thursday we went up to Falls Creek were we had agreed to meet Ryan and the bowl. He kindly showed us around the place which was cool. At lunch the lovely Paula, Ryan's mum, came by dressed in a bright pink body suit. Any remarks by us guys earned us a chip thrown at our heads by Ryan. We then had an afternoon lesson and our instructor was called Ed, or Edgar! That's the third person I've met in my lifetime with the same name as me. Number one was a friend of Dad's who was like a council/governement person for Amsterdam, called 'Edgar Peer' (Edgar Pear). Second was about 2 months ago in our game against Glenunga I think where one of the players was called Edgar (he looked to be South-American). And now my ski-instructor, who inherited his name from his old-English grandfather also shared my name. It was no coincidence that he was a very good instructor.

Other good memories include:

• stopping midway through a run (Rollercoaster) at Falls and taking off our skis to have a snow-fight, which was tiring running through powder snow with boots on.
  
• Me overtaking Tom, taunting him saying "byeeee" after which I nearly stack it. Tom laughs at me and overtakes me full of confidence in an effort to pay me back. So he too goes "byeee", but then does a ridiculous stack. We just sat there laughing.
• Me on the Poma lift turning around to ask Ryan where to get off. He replies; "at the top" following which I lose my balance and fall off. When Ryan eventually comes past he casually tells me;"or here".
• Spraying vanilla scented toilet spray in Bill's bed.
• Rachel skiing into wooden fences, trees and other stationary objects.

I came home from the ski-trip early on Saturday and not much had changed. Jimmy could use a trim though. Oh, and it seems our house has had a radical electrical upgrade. We got a new digital home phone with two handsets, a rice-cooker, dad got a new shaver, Juliette a new mobile phone (LG C1100). Now don't think "why the hell are you telling me this", because yea, I am. I was also pleased to discover that Telstra has reset our usage meter for this month. We had gone over the 10GB limit (again) before we were even halfway into the month, but now there shall be more downloading and stress-free surfing. We really have to look at an alternative, everytime we ring Telstra to ask what's going on they try and sell us a 20GB plan. We have an unlimited plan atm, but it's really not, because you get shaped to dialup speed once you exceed 10GB. I wonder if we can get ADSL 2+ up here. Mmmm, that bandwidth would be as wide as Jared before discovering Subway. Good joke Eddy.

30/07/2005: Wow it took me so long to upload those photos. I hate getting shaped. New month is just two days away...

This entry was posted on Monday, July 25, 2005 at 5:16 PM. You can skip to the end and leave a response.