So – for the first part of Maaike and my two week holiday we headed North do do the Queen Charlotte. Why? you may reasonably ask, seeing as I’ve done it about 3 times already. Well, it’s still an absolutely great route to bike, and also, the support (in terms of boats ferrying your gear, places to stay etc.) is simply superb. The entire three days of biking (two night accommodation, boat out to the end of the track, gear ferried between stops) took about, oh, 15 minutes of organisation. It’s really great.

One advantage of travel in September is that there’s relatively few other tourists about. The negative (as shall be dived into later) is that the weather is quite fickle. Still, for the QC the weather was broadly excellent.

There are some stunning views..

Here’s a link to the same video in HD fullscreen

Also – a video of some actual biking.. it’s slightly long (12 mins) and quite badly edited… basically… video editing takes ages and I’d rather get something up and have something to blog about – than have the perfect production. :)

So yes, an excellent few days of biking was had. At the end of the QC track is where the Outward Bound school ‘campus’ is. I checked back in to see how the tree we planted was doing..

It was doing extremely well – someone (or someones) have been looking after it… the were pretty much no weeds to speak of and it seemed to be fairing well, despite the relatively foul weather we’ve been having. I do wonder how much thought they’ve given to over-crowding in the various pieces of land they’ve set aside for the various watches to plant – but hey ho, maybe there’ll be a massive transplanting operation.

If there’s one thing I struggle with it’s this concept of 20 days holiday a year… especially if you can’t get unpaid leave. In one tiny respect it makes the time you do spend on holiday that much more ‘precious’ as you have had to wait so long to accumulate it, but generally I’d far rather less cash and more time off. My current employer is excellent, but as we’re basically busy all the time (a good thing) getting unpaid leave is a relatively expensive thing for the company to give out. I’m not sure how this can be solved, but certainly next year for a family gathering in August I’ll be looking for at least a month off. I’ve yet to have that conversation, but I’m hopeful it will go smoothly enough.

It was a slightly scratchy day at Broken River – but great to be out in the Sun. Thanks to Chloe for taking the video below. Looking at it, I can see that I’ve so so so SO much more to go to get anyway decent at this skiing lark. If you contrast how _non_ shaky her video is, compared to the ones I take… I’m definitely not just pointing my body downhill and pivoting properly. Still.. it’s good to have room for improvement. After all, it’s pretty much impossible to be perfect at everything all the time ;)

It’s also is probably the last day of the season for me. It certainly has been a mixed one. We had such a great dump of snow at the start of the season, but then it really did tail off, and then a bang again in late August.

You can sort of see it reflected in the Snowpool statistics..

Still, lovely to be out and about. Still, it’s not the end of the world.. after all.. now it’s into the hiking biking & climbing season. Terrible country this ;)

Finally I feel like I’ve done Matt’s overly generous GoPro justice. Damn it was fun fun and more fun.

Maaike did very well for her first time on powder… and last weekend at Olympus managed to get up on the nutcrackers – some excellent progress there!

Other than that, quite busy at work and looking forward to a proper holiday in a couple of weeks time! Need to get more exciting things happening on a blog. Oh, and Maaike and I bought a car from her boss who left the country – more to come on that later..

Had a great long weekend (my first day of holiday since Christmas! CHRISTMAS! something needs to be done about this). Anyway… had a great time with a huge bunch of friends down in Twizel. Michelle G did an excellent job of organising the (20?+) people. A big pot luck dinner was had on the Saturday, and much merriment was had by all.

Roundhill probably had the best skiing, unfortunately the day that I had my camera there is was cloudy – so you only get nice pics of Dobson (where we went on the way home).

Other than that, had the annual mulled wine & mince pie party. Next year we definitely have to tell people _not_ to bring wine. Or, at the very least, not encourage them to bring any. It’s slightly embarrassing to end up with slightly _more_ wine than you started the evening with. I mean, it’s a good problem to have, but still… it’s a problem.

Anyway.. here’s a quick run at Dobson. I’m unsure how to make videos in a way that doesn’t make you seasick watching them. Maybe I just need to get a lot better at pointing downhill. I thought I was getting better at that, but it seems perhaps not!

So.. this weekend off to Lyford (Maaike was away cross country skiing.. Michelle put a few pictures up on the snowpool photo competition page..

Anyway, while Maaike was off doing that – I got a days skiing in at Lyford. It was _OK_.. nice to be out I guess, but the conditions weren’t the best. Anyway, here’s a video of my first time this year on a nutcracker… definitely an efficient way of getting up the hill (and oh so much more comfortable on ski’s than a board)

Thanks to Can & Dan & Ian for a great trip!