Snow and beach

Early start on Saturday, as Emily and I headed to Snow Summit for some end-of-season skiing. We set the alarm clock for 6am, then drove the 130 miles to the resort and were on the sloped by about 10:00am.

They had a load of snow in the week, and conditions were...OK. There was plenty of snow coverage on all but one of the runs, though it was a little icy in the morning and a bit slushy in the afternoon. We set ourselves the objective of skiing all of the trails, and were pretty successful. We missed most of the "Family Park" (for obvious reasons) and didn't do all of the freestyle bits. But we did all of the black diamond runs and two of the three double black diamond runs (albeit rather slowly and cautiously).

I fell over numerous times, and managed on one occasion to find myself face down, toes facing out with skis still attached, unable to move! After a few minutes of floundering I was able to get one of my ski bindings released with one of my poles. Dang it. However, it got worse (or more daft) later on. I managed to fall over and land on one of my poles, bending the bloody thing!

How embarrassing.

The day was lots of fun though (photos were taken) and we only got delayed by about half an hour due to traffic near LA on the way home.

On Sunday we went to the beach! It is a bizarre and unexpected fact of life that here one can be in the mountains surrounded by snow and then be on a nice warm beach in the space of just a few hours. This is of course also a fact that must be taken advantage of!

The weather was very nice on Sunday, as you might have gathered. It put us in the mood to buy new flip flops. Ours were both getting pretty shabby, mine in particular were almost falling off my feet as the straps were so stretched out. So we went over the road to Hansen's and ended up getting matching his-n-hers Rainbow flip flops. They are meant to last for yonks and be plenty comfortable.

So, with new flip-flops in hand (or rather on foot) we took a nice long walk along the beach. Very stereotypical. But nice nonetheless.