Weekend Programming

The last two days I had my weekend programs, which both went very well.

My kids on Saturday were a little excitable, but they came round and we did some good skiing. At one point they were accusing me of having killed all the bears, as well as having sunk The Titanic, two feats I can only dream of having the power to actually perform. This then led to a pretend phone call to the police, informing them of my sins and asking that they come to arrest me "at Banff, at a mountain", which did rather make me chuckle. Saturday night was a pretty quiet one before I went back up the mountain today.

My Sunday Mini-mites group was depleted by 1, as Hugo didn't turn up, apparently because he was sick. The four of us (Anna-Maria, Janelle, Sophia and I) soldiered on through the - 16 temperatures and did about 4 good runs in our 2 hours, which I was pretty satisfied with. I would have liked to have gotten on to doing some parallel ("french-fry") turns, but it was not to be.

After this and after some lunch I went for a Level 2 training / steep terrain session which was good, I always feel like my skiing gets better after these. A nice moment for me was when I was on Big Chair (the 2-man that goes up to all the steepest expert runs) with Yusaku (who had been teaching us) and he said, "so, you're pretty good at skiing bumps and powder, I see" which was awesome.

I then went up with a bunch of the other instructors and had a run at the Acrobag: basically a huge, cuboid bouncy castle with a huge jump in front of it. These are mainly used for pros to practice huge tricks on, but we all just went and hit it for the big air and soft landing, which was really fun (videos to follow).

Finally, I had this email forwarded to me by Gord:

To whom it may concern.

I am writing to express my thanks to four members of your staff. 
Myself, my husband and our three boys visited your resort on Friday 
21st, Mon 24th, Tues 25th, Wed 26th and Thur 27th January of this 
year. Matthew had lessons with Daniel from High Wycombe, Iain and Kai 
had lessons with Sam from Australia and myself and Joe had lessons 
with Jon from Cambridge. They, alongside Gretchen on the front desk 
did everything possible to make our lessons go as smoothly as 
possible.They went out of their way to accommodate us and make sure we 
had an amazing time!

I have to congratulate you on hiring such good team members and them 
for taking their jobs seriously and not just treating us as something 
they had to do to pass the time! We have all left your ski resort with 
some excellent memories (and lots of  funny stories for the staff 
concerned to tell their friends later on after the resort has closed!)

Can you please pass this email on to the four people concerned to show 
them that their time and patience was very much appreciated! (Poor Jon 
certainly earnt his money teaching me to ski and was very patient- I 
would have lost my temper with somebody like me on day one and refused 
to teach them anymore!)

We are all home now (after a very long flight) but the skiing and 
snowboarding is all the boys could talk about on the way home and that 
is what they have spoken to other people about! We will definately be 
coming to Canada again next year and visiting your resort.

Thank you again and well done to you all.

Kind regards

Tracey Lewis (And Iain, Matthew, Kai and Joe)


Having that passed on was really cool, and Gord also mentioned it at roll-call this morning to everyone who gave the four of us a nice little round of applause; good stuff all round. 


It's difficult to believe that it's already the end of January, which means that thing will be picking in terms of how busy we are, and I'm scheduled for 5 days next week, with tomorrow and Thursday off. 


So, for now, in case I don't see you, good afternoon, good evening and good night.