What I did on my Holidays by ME, aged 29-and-a-half
As mentioned in my rather, um, musical post below (packing clearly does strange things to my brain) I spent last week at the snow, which is (as always) much better than being at the office, regardless of how much snow is actually on the ground.
This was a family trip - attendees were me (obviously), my parents, my siblings (genetic and in-law) and my sister's 9-month old son. We stayed in Jindabyne, at the Ski Club associated with the Girl Guide Activities centre (Araluen), which myself, my mother and my sister are all members of. The family has been staying there for years and years (Mum and Dad helped build the place), so it's sort of a regular holiday home for me now. Its a do-your-own-catering place with no TV, no internet, a big open fire in the lounge room and lots of books and games and things. For those who know Jindabyne, its on the Barry way which is the last street on the ski-fields side of town, but still within 10 minutes walk of Nuggets and the Town Centre. The front half of the building is used by Guiding and other groups and is all dormitories, while the ski club has the back half, with private rooms and rather more in the way of creature comforts.
Anyway, getting to the point now that the scene is set:
I travelled down on Saturday the 8th with my brother and sister-in-law, leaving around 10am which is late enough that I'm not allowed to complain about it being early :). Mum and Dad went down on Friday, while My sister, her husband and the baby left much earlier than us in a separate car. The traffic was really good considering that it was still school holidays, and we ended up in Goulburn for lunch, since none of us were in the mood for service-centre fast food. While there we got a phone call from my sister asking just where the road to the snow turned off the Hume Highway? It turned out they'd missed the Federal highway turnoff just out of Goulburn, and didn't realize that they'd gone wrong till they got to Gundagai! I suppose that they could have turned off there and gone via Tumut and Adaminaby, but that's definitely the long way round and none of us had a map of the roads through there anyway. They turned back, and cut through to Canberra via Yass and we all met up on the road to Cooma.
We arrived in Jindabyne in the mid afternoon, and quickly took over the lodge with board games and baby toys. My family is clearly developing alcoholic tendencies, since we also found we had 18 bottles of wine, a case of beer, a sixpack of breezers, a bottle of scotch and a bottle of port between the seven of us - needless to say, we didn't actually get though it all.
Sunday was our first day's actual skiing. Because the snow this year has been fairly sparse (due to the drought), there wasn't much in the way of terrain to choose from, since the only things open at the resorts is the areas where there's a lot of snowmaking. We ended up picking PB as out destination for the week, since its beginner's terrain and intermediate terrain are right next to each other, and my sister-in-law had never skiied (or even seen snow) before. We also had to be somewhere that someone could sit and mind the baby without being too far away from the rest of us.
We ended up driving to Perisher and taking the skitube up to Blue Cow. The baby and his minder-of-the-moment (his parents and grandparents took turns) were parked at a table by the window in the Terminal restaurant, and the rest of us took to the slopes.
We started out at the rope tows, teaching my sister-in-law the basics like 'falling down', 'stopping', 'going straight', 'turning' and 'throwing snowballs at your husband'. After a short while, it was very clear that there were far too many teachers involved and most of us buggered off to try and remember how to ski ourselves. We've all been skiing for years, but it always seems to take a run or two on the bunny slope to remember how everything works again.
Blue Cow had four of five chairlifts running, but only really one run for each: Excelerator for the Ridge chair; Zalis for the Summit, and the standard 'back to the bottom' runs for the Easy Starter and Terminal Chairs. Neither PB nor Guthega were accessible, and Pleasant Valley was shut. The snow quality was surprisingly good on the open runs: neither slushy nor icy, and plenty of it. The condition of the closed areas, though (shrubs and sometimes bare grass) showed that the snowmakers have performed a minor miracle to have even this much terrain open for the school holidays. The only advanced run open in the whole of PB was Excelerator (and even that's only just black) but I can understand why this wasn't a priority for them.
The queues weren't too bad, but the weather wasn't particularly friendly either: cold enough to keep the snowguns running all day, and windy enough that chairlift rides were a little miserable. We ran into a friend who is instructing at PB this season and she said that Front Valley at Perisher was even worse, so we'd clearly picked the right spot for the day. We skiied till mid-afternoon then gave up for the day, having graduated my SIL to the green run under the chairlift and reacquainted eveyone else with their relative levels of unfitness.
Having skiied out Blue Cow on Sunday, we tried Front Valley at Perisher on the Monday. Unfortunately the wind was worse, and all of Blue Cow's chairlifts were on wind-hold so the whole school holiday crowd was also on Front valley - midgets in lessons, teenagers on snowboards who know less than they think they do - nervous adults who fall over in lift queues - the whole lot. The J-bars and one T-bar were cordoned off for the children's ski school, so there was only the 8-seater chairlift and two T-bars for everyone else, including the private school kids involved in a slalom race down the middle of everything. The queues, as you can imagine, were ghastly - at least half an hour long, and I think we only did 6 or 8 runs the whole day.
Late in the morning the Freelander quad opened to midstation, and the Happy Valley T-bar also opened, which took some of the pressure off. We tried Happy Valley, but the run was mostly ice and rocks down to an enourmous queue to come back up, so we took refuge around cups of hot chocolate at the Freelander midstation for much of the afternoon, then gave up for the day.
Monday night the family all went out for dinner, technically for my brother's birthday the following day. We ended up at another favourite family location: Crackenback cottage, which is an old (1850s) stone farmhouse in the Thredbo valley that does absolutely fantastic food. They also have an enourmous wooden maze (which I 'solved' last time I was there by crawling under walls till I found my way out), but it was a bit dark and cold to go stumbling around in that.
Tuesday, we all took a day off. This involved far too many pancakes, lazing around the fire most of the day, several games of monopoly and a trip into Jindabyne town centre to get us out from under Mum's feet for a while. Its a nice walk from the lodge into town, but it was sleeting on and off all day, so we ended up driving in. Since Jindabyne is almost entirely filled with ski-gear shops, the only thing we ended up buying was matching pairs of the worlds silliest socks (fluffy, knee-high, blue, purple and pink-striped toe socks) for all four women in the family.
By Tuesday evening, the radio was reporting good snowfalls, so four of us (sans grandparents, baby and beginner) piled in the car to go up for night skiing. It was snowing fairly hard for much of the way up, but when we reached PB the cloud was low enough that you couldn't see the terminal from the carpark, and could only dimly see the floodlights on the lowest lift tower. Since skiing in a whiteout is bad enough during the day, we thus decided to turn around and go home again. Sensible as this decision may have been, the cloud apparently lifted shortly after we left: friends from the lodge were up there the same evening and had a ball :(.
With sure knowledge of fresh snow, we made plans for an early start on Wednesday...and for remembering to get the camera out. Stay tuned for the next post!
Continued in parts 2 and 3.
This was a family trip - attendees were me (obviously), my parents, my siblings (genetic and in-law) and my sister's 9-month old son. We stayed in Jindabyne, at the Ski Club associated with the Girl Guide Activities centre (Araluen), which myself, my mother and my sister are all members of. The family has been staying there for years and years (Mum and Dad helped build the place), so it's sort of a regular holiday home for me now. Its a do-your-own-catering place with no TV, no internet, a big open fire in the lounge room and lots of books and games and things. For those who know Jindabyne, its on the Barry way which is the last street on the ski-fields side of town, but still within 10 minutes walk of Nuggets and the Town Centre. The front half of the building is used by Guiding and other groups and is all dormitories, while the ski club has the back half, with private rooms and rather more in the way of creature comforts.
Anyway, getting to the point now that the scene is set:
I travelled down on Saturday the 8th with my brother and sister-in-law, leaving around 10am which is late enough that I'm not allowed to complain about it being early :). Mum and Dad went down on Friday, while My sister, her husband and the baby left much earlier than us in a separate car. The traffic was really good considering that it was still school holidays, and we ended up in Goulburn for lunch, since none of us were in the mood for service-centre fast food. While there we got a phone call from my sister asking just where the road to the snow turned off the Hume Highway? It turned out they'd missed the Federal highway turnoff just out of Goulburn, and didn't realize that they'd gone wrong till they got to Gundagai! I suppose that they could have turned off there and gone via Tumut and Adaminaby, but that's definitely the long way round and none of us had a map of the roads through there anyway. They turned back, and cut through to Canberra via Yass and we all met up on the road to Cooma.
We arrived in Jindabyne in the mid afternoon, and quickly took over the lodge with board games and baby toys. My family is clearly developing alcoholic tendencies, since we also found we had 18 bottles of wine, a case of beer, a sixpack of breezers, a bottle of scotch and a bottle of port between the seven of us - needless to say, we didn't actually get though it all.
Sunday was our first day's actual skiing. Because the snow this year has been fairly sparse (due to the drought), there wasn't much in the way of terrain to choose from, since the only things open at the resorts is the areas where there's a lot of snowmaking. We ended up picking PB as out destination for the week, since its beginner's terrain and intermediate terrain are right next to each other, and my sister-in-law had never skiied (or even seen snow) before. We also had to be somewhere that someone could sit and mind the baby without being too far away from the rest of us.
We ended up driving to Perisher and taking the skitube up to Blue Cow. The baby and his minder-of-the-moment (his parents and grandparents took turns) were parked at a table by the window in the Terminal restaurant, and the rest of us took to the slopes.
We started out at the rope tows, teaching my sister-in-law the basics like 'falling down', 'stopping', 'going straight', 'turning' and 'throwing snowballs at your husband'. After a short while, it was very clear that there were far too many teachers involved and most of us buggered off to try and remember how to ski ourselves. We've all been skiing for years, but it always seems to take a run or two on the bunny slope to remember how everything works again.
Blue Cow had four of five chairlifts running, but only really one run for each: Excelerator for the Ridge chair; Zalis for the Summit, and the standard 'back to the bottom' runs for the Easy Starter and Terminal Chairs. Neither PB nor Guthega were accessible, and Pleasant Valley was shut. The snow quality was surprisingly good on the open runs: neither slushy nor icy, and plenty of it. The condition of the closed areas, though (shrubs and sometimes bare grass) showed that the snowmakers have performed a minor miracle to have even this much terrain open for the school holidays. The only advanced run open in the whole of PB was Excelerator (and even that's only just black) but I can understand why this wasn't a priority for them.
The queues weren't too bad, but the weather wasn't particularly friendly either: cold enough to keep the snowguns running all day, and windy enough that chairlift rides were a little miserable. We ran into a friend who is instructing at PB this season and she said that Front Valley at Perisher was even worse, so we'd clearly picked the right spot for the day. We skiied till mid-afternoon then gave up for the day, having graduated my SIL to the green run under the chairlift and reacquainted eveyone else with their relative levels of unfitness.
Having skiied out Blue Cow on Sunday, we tried Front Valley at Perisher on the Monday. Unfortunately the wind was worse, and all of Blue Cow's chairlifts were on wind-hold so the whole school holiday crowd was also on Front valley - midgets in lessons, teenagers on snowboards who know less than they think they do - nervous adults who fall over in lift queues - the whole lot. The J-bars and one T-bar were cordoned off for the children's ski school, so there was only the 8-seater chairlift and two T-bars for everyone else, including the private school kids involved in a slalom race down the middle of everything. The queues, as you can imagine, were ghastly - at least half an hour long, and I think we only did 6 or 8 runs the whole day.
Late in the morning the Freelander quad opened to midstation, and the Happy Valley T-bar also opened, which took some of the pressure off. We tried Happy Valley, but the run was mostly ice and rocks down to an enourmous queue to come back up, so we took refuge around cups of hot chocolate at the Freelander midstation for much of the afternoon, then gave up for the day.
Monday night the family all went out for dinner, technically for my brother's birthday the following day. We ended up at another favourite family location: Crackenback cottage, which is an old (1850s) stone farmhouse in the Thredbo valley that does absolutely fantastic food. They also have an enourmous wooden maze (which I 'solved' last time I was there by crawling under walls till I found my way out), but it was a bit dark and cold to go stumbling around in that.
Tuesday, we all took a day off. This involved far too many pancakes, lazing around the fire most of the day, several games of monopoly and a trip into Jindabyne town centre to get us out from under Mum's feet for a while. Its a nice walk from the lodge into town, but it was sleeting on and off all day, so we ended up driving in. Since Jindabyne is almost entirely filled with ski-gear shops, the only thing we ended up buying was matching pairs of the worlds silliest socks (fluffy, knee-high, blue, purple and pink-striped toe socks) for all four women in the family.
By Tuesday evening, the radio was reporting good snowfalls, so four of us (sans grandparents, baby and beginner) piled in the car to go up for night skiing. It was snowing fairly hard for much of the way up, but when we reached PB the cloud was low enough that you couldn't see the terminal from the carpark, and could only dimly see the floodlights on the lowest lift tower. Since skiing in a whiteout is bad enough during the day, we thus decided to turn around and go home again. Sensible as this decision may have been, the cloud apparently lifted shortly after we left: friends from the lodge were up there the same evening and had a ball :(.
With sure knowledge of fresh snow, we made plans for an early start on Wednesday...and for remembering to get the camera out. Stay tuned for the next post!
Continued in parts 2 and 3.