We are off to Portland tomorrow for a mini long weekend holiday. I’m looking forward to all the doughnuts, brunch, ice cream, cocktails, beer and other delicious food we will get to eat. Portland seems to have a lot of great foodie options! Scott printed out a map for me and I’ve been marking all the different recommended places on it for maximum tasty eats, no matter which area we end up in.
I also plan on stopping for Taco Bell breakfast on the way there. Hehehehe.
When I was in Calgary I stayed part of the time at my teammates’ girlfriends’ parents’ place (holy apostrophe) and part of the time with my friend Ally and her hb (from my university days in Halifax!). Couch surfing like that saved me a ton of money and also it was fun. It’s always enjoyable catching up with awesome people that you haven’t seen in a while.
Ally took me to her barn and I got to ride her horse! Actually that is not her horse in the picture above though, that is her friends’ horse. We swapped for a bit because I couldn’t get Ruffino to go anywhere that I wanted him to, haha. I had a lot of fun riding around. I think the last time I had been on a horse was in Girl Guides.
Lesley came to Calgary for a few of the days that I was there too. Ally took all of us to Peter’s Drive In where we all got cheeseburgers and milkshakes and an ENORMOUS bag of fries. It was very tasty, and very reasonably priced.
The extreme Olympic watching carried over from Ottawa to Calgary. Ally even had a 5AM hockey party at her house. I slept through the first ten minutes but smelled bacon cooking so I got up to watch too. Having a morning party is pretty cool because breakfast makes great party food.
I went out with Matt’s friends one night in the city. We went to The Unicorn for dinner and a couple drinks. I had perogies and kielbasa that was pretty decent. I was super nervous about riding the train around downtown with no tickets but 2 days later I found out that it is free, hahahaha.
Then it was finally time to catch the bus back to Vancouver. It was 16 hours but it was cheap ($49 including taxes). I’ve never been through that part of Canada so I picked a bus that left in the daytime. The weather was perfect and it was a very beautiful drive. My butt did start to hurt a lot by the time I got back to Kamloops though.
Canmore seemed really pretty. Is Canmore the Squamish of Alberta?
Also I have never seen so much snow as I did around Revelstoke!!! I’m from Ontario but still, oh my word there was so much snow. A meter tall column of snow perched on top of a tiny phone pole??! HAHA! More on the ground. Avalanche piles everywhere. Snowbanks as tall as the bus! Those snow shed tunnel thingies were interesting too. SO MUCH SNOW!!!
I think this was Shuswap Lake. It looked COLD.
The only really bad part of the bus ride was the dinner stop in Kamloops. By that point I was super sick of all my bus snacks that I brought and just wanted something with some vegetables in it for dinner. I didn’t have high expectations, even a McDonalds salad would have done the trick. From the bus stop I could see a ton of decent fast food options, but they were JUST far enough that you wouldn’t have time to walk there and get food and walk back in time. Especially because I wasted a few precious minutes using the washroom. Blergh. Torture. The bus stop restaurant actually had zero vegetable items. Unless you count green jello, cuz they had that.
But yeah that was the only bad part. I think I would take the bus again, if it was still so cheap and I still had a whole day to waste. Buses have internet and plugs on them now so it’s not even that boring.
Last last week I was lucky enough to be able to take part of Can-Am week at the COP in Calgary. It was a week intended to give extra coaching and training to new sliders. That being said, Matt and I were definitely the most new out of everyone. Most of the other people had been sliding for a couple years and already had experience on a bunch of different tracks, or at least had a lot of experience on the Calgary track. There were a few guys from USA, a few from Ontario, a whole bunch of people from Alberta, and the four of us from BC.
The Calgary track is not near as fast as Whistler. But it does have its own challenges. The main one for us was that it is REALLY REALLY BUMPY. Also really really dirty. Because it is so close to the city a lot of dirt blows in. Also the track workers just aren’t as awesome as at Whistler. We are so spoiled at Whistler. There was bird poo frozen onto the track, and also sawdust? Yuck.
ANYWAY because it wasn’t so fast we were able to start from the top on our second run! This meant doing my first ever running start!! (My skeleton/life goal for this season!) The first few runs I did two-handed “running” starts (really I was pretty much walking). Fun! Later we had a couple sessions in the icehouse (an indoor push track practice thingy) where Ivo helped us work on our real one-handed running starts. It did help a lot but I will admit I still pushed somewhat tentatively on the real track because I was terrified of popping the groove and also crashing. PS you can see a video of me doing a running start on my Facebook wall.
The best part of the week was that there were always at least 3 coaches watching our runs. One coach even took videos. Then after each run they would come give us feedback on how we did and how we can improve. Very cool and very helpful. A lot of the pictures in this post are stills from the videos.
Like I said, the track is not super hard. There are only two parts that I had to worry about. 1) corner 8, which has the potential to flip you over if you go into it too late. I came close to flipping but managed to stay right-side-up the entire week. And 2) the kreisel (a 270 degree corner 3 pressure corner), which I also survived fine. Maybe just because I did “safety steers” though, which helped me but also slowed me down a lot. The fastest speed I got was only 107.9 km/hr!! (The good dudes were getting around 114 km/hr). One time I was NINE SECONDS slower than Mitch. NINE SECONDS!! Was I even on the same track?? I swear there was a short-cut I didn’t know about, haha.
On the last day of the week we had a fun race. I expected I was going to come in last place, and I did, but they were some of my best runs of the whole week so I still felt pretty good. They were my quickest and cleanest runs with my best push times. That’s success for me. Also it was really awesome that Lesley was able to come watch, it made me feel supported.
COLD KATRINA.
All in all it was a successful week. I learned SO MUCH. LIKE, SO MUCH. Everything makes a lot more sense now. It was tiring and challenging at times, but also super fun. While it was extremely embarrassing being so bad/new sometimes, the coaches and other sliders were always really encouraging and friendly. I loved meeting other sliders and making new friends. I’m so glad I was given the opportunity to take part in the training week.
When was the last time you went tobogganing??
A helpful shove.
This was me practising skeleton running starts hahahhaaaa. Not quite the same as skeleton but it was fun launching myself face first down the hill on the big plastic toboggan.
Rosemarie and I trying doubles luge. I couldn’t stop laughing. THE BIG PERSON GOES ON THE TOP!!
That was a fun night. I’m glad so many people came over to have silly fun with me. PS thanks to Callum for taking so many pictures!
Scott had never been to a wintery place before so we crammed our time in Ottawa with tons of snowy activities. It’s even been a pretty long time since I have been in real snow (on purpose!!)! It ended up being a really fun week.
Rosemarie, Scott and I spent one morning building a snow fort on the front lawn. It even had a slide attached. It amused me how fast we built the fort…. there is a big difference between what three adults with adult shovels can build and what kids with kids shovels can build, haha. Scott spent another morning working on it himself (I stayed indoors and took pictures), and then another whole morning digging deeper into the snow as well.
I think it was a pretty sweet fort. So much seating!
We also spent a significant amount of the trip watching the Olympics. My dad had a two TV (plus picture-in-picture) set up so we could watch maximum sports all the time. I really enjoyed watching curling this year, and of course skeleton.
Rosemarie’s friend Liz (who was on exchange in Fiji with her) came to visit us in Ottawa. Dad and Kate suggested that we go for a skate on the canal immediately after picking her up from the bus station. I didn’t even know you were allowed to skate on the canal at night but I’m glad we went because it was so empty! We pretty much had the ice to ourselves, although the Beaver Tail stands were closed so that was a bummer. Scott improved his skating quite a lot that night. I think we skated 4 km in total.
The next day we went downtown again to check out Winterlude stuff. Look how busy the canal was that afternoon! I’m so glad we did our skating at midnight cuz that is wacko busy. You can’t even see the ice after the bridge!!
We checked out the ice sculptures and ate shawarma and then finally got our Beaver Tails. I had a nutella one and it was delicious. Scott stuck with the classic Killaloe Sunrise.
Unpictured…
Ah and it’s March 1st so here is my second 1 Second Everyday video!