Friday 6th July 2007

The alarm woke us up at about 7am this morning because we needed to be in town for about 8am - to be able to catch the coach to the top of Coronet Peak - where we would be going skiing... yippee!

We got to town fine and the queue for the bus was already huge. We were quite early (for a change), so Nikki went and got us a hot chocolate to keep us warm whilst we waited. We got talking to a family from Australia and they seemed really interested in our trip. They said that they'd done a few months traveling around Europe, so they knew how it can be sometimes and then gave us their phone number - saying if we wanted, we could stay with them for a while!

The weather on the mountain was causing trouble for the coaches and we eventually got on one at just before 10am (D'oh! We were supposed to be having our first lesson at 10.20am). The road up to the top was awesome. One minute the roads were fine, then the next the driver had to pull over to put snow-chains on the wheels because everywhere was covered in about a foot of snow! When we finally got there and had collected all the rental clothes and gear it was time to hit the snow. Or so we thought...

We were told that the slopes were especially busy and that our first lesson might get cancelled. After half an hour of everyone complaining, they rescheduled our lesson for 12pm, we even had the boss dragged out of his office to teach us.

We felt the lesson was a bit basic, this was probably because I had previously bought us a dry slope skiing lesson, so we did have a small amount of knowledge. The lesson lasted for 1.5 hours and then we had a quick break for lunch before our second lesson at 2pm.

This afternoon's lesson was great! We were taken a bit higher up the mountain (using the Magic Carpet) and once we were taught how to stop and turn we were allowed to practice what we'd learnt on our own. The queue for the Magic Carpet was about 5 minutes long, so, rather than waiting, we were taking off our skis and running back up the mountain so we could get more goes in.

After about 7 or 8 runs, disaster struck! I was hurtling down the mountain (to film Nikki coming down) and ran out of room to stop. Instead, I crashed into the fence and my skis went right through. It was lucky the fence was there because, otherwise, I would have gone flying off the mountain!

We absolutely loved the skiing and we wished we had gone up the mountain earlier in the week, so we could have gone again. Nikki was brilliant and didn't moan at all about the fact that it was -4°!

This evening we went into town and went into Winnies for some food. There was quite a long wait, so we sat in front of the big open fire, with a beer, waiting for our table. The pizza was great but poor Nikki had to put up with me moaning all night about how much my legs were aching.

Weeeeeeeeeeeee! Skiing rocks!