Tuesday, February 10, 2009

Winterlude

Winterlude is a big winter festival held in The national capital region every year, it lasts for 3 weeks. There are things happening all over the city, concerts, sound and light shows, ice carvings, snow parks and heaps of fun games like bed racing on the ice.

Snow and Ice

Becs and Leon from New Zealand arrived, and we had a fun fulled week, snowboarding, ice skating and sightseeing around Ottawa.
Our first stop was the ski hill, Edelweiss. We got a cheap package deal to learn how to snowboard. It included snowboard hire, 1 hour lesson and a 4 hour lift pass, all for $45. It was even better value when we found out that between the 4 of us we had 3instructors. Edelweiss is located about 30 minutes from Ottawa city, and is in Gatineau Park. We arrived at Edelweiss and tryed to find out where to go and went into the rental building, we were meet by a very grumpy girl who was not very happy to see us and stormed off to find our booking. She came back and told us to go to the main office where we finally found where to go. The people in the office were alot nicer. We grabbed all our tickets and we had to go back to the grump girl in the rentals to get our gear, we did all survive but only just.
After waiting inside for our instructors we went out into a snow storm to learn how to snowboard. I spent most of the time on my bum, but did manage to learn a little bit. By the end of our lesson I could turn but stopping was slightly more challenging, and I always seemed to end up on my bum. We had a fun day, but my bum was really sore by the end and it is still sore over a week later. Although it was a snow storm the snow was powder and I was told that it was alot softer than it normally is but my bum doesn't think so.

The next day all four of us were sore but we decided to hit the rideau canal for a bit of Ice skating, and hopefully stretch out our sore muscles. We all piled into the Honda and headed to a fire station to park and we walked to the canal. The Rideau Canal is a UNESCO world heritage site. It is the worlds longest outdoor skating rink and it is 7.8 Km long. We had a slow start but Fraser and I managed to ice skate without falling over, not that we went that far only a few hundred meters. Bec and Leon had already been ice skating before and they were off. While on the canal we also had beaver tails (deep fryed pastry covered in cinnamon and sugar or chocolate) They are really good.

Monday, February 2, 2009

A winter's walk


It was a beautiful sunny day without a cloud in the sky, so we decided to go into town and go for a walk. It was so cold that Fraser's eyes started to water, then they froze shut.