Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Forget Extreme Sports....Extreme Temperatures!!

We left Sydney in our flip flops and 34°C heat and arrived in Fernie (British Columbia, Canada) in our thermals and -34°C cold!! Well it wasn’t actually -34°C til the following week, but it makes for better reading this way!!
Eventually we arrived at the hotel, after a staggering 30 hours of travelling, to be told that the hotel ‘restaurant’ was about to close. We literally dropped our gear in the room and rushed downstairs to be met in the foyer by Andy and Treena, our friends from Dulwich.
We planned the holiday so that we could meet up with them for some snow therapy. It was fantastic to see them again, and we dragged them into the restaurant to watch us eat and catch up on the previous year!
That was the start of two brilliant weeks of snowboarding, drinking, eating and sleeping, in that order of priority!!


The previous two seasons had been rather bad for Fernie, so we were glad to arrive to plenty of snow. We were staying in the town, which was originally established because of coal mining, and there were plenty of places to eat and drink. Fernie has an outstandingly delicious meal called ‘putine’. This is a scrumptious dish of perfectly fried chips with yummy gravy, topped off with shavings of cheese (we didn’t have the cheese that often)!! Needless to say, this reminded us of our own mining home town – Doncaster.

There was a huge dumping of snow in the second week, which satisfied our cravings for the white stuff and put smiles on everyone’s faces! There were lots of whoops and screams of enjoyment emanating from the slopes.
There were the predictable number of falls and sprains, but thankfully nothing serious! I was the lucky recipient of a huge bruise on my leg, thanks to the T-bar (still haven’t mastered that particular art)!!
We usually take the video camera on the slopes, but this year we just didn’t seem to have the time. We really only took photos of the area and a few from the lifts. So sorry there are no action shots!