Snowmoboarding

Once again it was a sleeping-in, lazyish morning for me. I read for a bit before finally getting out of bed and getting ready for the day. I went checking my e-mail a little bit after noon and Ty came into my room to tell me that our high school English and French/choir teachers (they're married) had come by to drop off some tithe for my dad and wanted to see us. So I went to talk to them for a bit. It was nice seeing them again and getting all caught up with each other. They were in Alberta for Christmas and said they were quite happy to get back to the milder BC temperatures.

In the afternoon our family and Tyler's friend, Isaac who lives just across the border a couple hours south of us, took our snowmobile and the one my cousin's daughter uses up into the mountains. Then we spent several hours driving up and down the logging roads. For the majority of the time we took turns pulling each other on snowboards/skis which was so much tons of fun! I even tried Bryn's snowboard and it wasn't near as bad as the last time we switched equipment. I just put my snowmobiling boots into her snowboard bindings and it actually worked alright. The only part that was hard for me was steering. I kept edging off toward the left-hand side of the road and once I hit the branches of a tree and broke some off. I fell many times, but by the end I was getting the hang of things a bit better. My second fall of my snowboarding experience I went straight down on my knees so they're a little bruised and sore, but it was too terrible. The snow is pretty thick up there so falling wasn't too painful usually. Ty and Isaac used my dad's snowmobile and Bryn and I used the smaller one. My mum stayed up at the junction between two logging roads were we had parked the truck and trailer and my dad stayed around there for most of the time too, but took a couple rides around on the snowmobiles in between when we went. After both Bryn and I snowboarded behind the snowmobile, we got out my ski boots and skis and tried that. My dad was just moving his snowmobile to get it reset up for Isaac to pull Ty on his snowboard when he drove over the tow rope that Bryn and I had been using. The rope got all caught up and wound around both sides of the snowmobile track and so I ran over to help him. We tried and tried to get the handle back through the track but it was just too long to go around some of the curves. I'm not sure how it got through originally, but finally my dad found a way to undo the handle from the rope and then it was easy to pull back through and untangle the rope from the snowmobile. Then I towed Bryn on the skis and then we switched and she pulled me. That was the most fun part of the whole afternoon. It was just like waterskiing except for colder and not quite so wet. It was so much easier for me to steer on the skis than with the snowboard and I was skiing all over the road just like how waterskiers cross the wake. By the time we turned around to come back it was getting pretty dark so once we got back to the truck we loaded up the snowmobiles, got all our gear into the truck, and headed back into town.

A couple hours later we drove downtown to meet some church friends at The Keg for a supper out. My dad had gift cards for that restaurant from last Christmas and this one from someone at his business so it was nice to be able to share the meal with others. The adults, my parents, one of my dad's salesmen, Arnie, and his wife Lori, sat at one end of the table and the young adults, my siblings and I, Isaac and a guy from Australia that's stay with Arnie and Lori while he works here, Daniel, sat at the other end. We had a great time learning more about each other and, of course, eating. Daniel told us that his dad was a taxidermist and then Ty and I peppered him with questions about taxidermy. I sure learned a lot of stuff I never knew before. Later in our conversation we tried to think of a name for the snowmobiling-snowboarding/skiing that we'd done that afternoon. Ty came up with boardmobiling (which would be skimobiling when skis are used) and Daniel thought up snowmoboarding (or snowmoskiing). I think they're all great, but I think I like how snowmoboarding sounds best.

Now we're home and I'm planning to spend the rest of my evening reading. That is if Bryn doesn't convince me to watch a movie with her and my parents instead. We'll see. Both sound good. Oh, and not to leave hockey out in today's post, feel free to read my Olympics Hockey Roster post on my other blog if you're just dying to find out who will represent Canada in February's Vancouver Olympics.