May is the new Spring!

The cousins had a blast over the weekend with amazing autumn spring-like conditions and the entire mountain to ourselves. On Saturday morning I got some quality lines dropping off the Great Alpine Road in epic spring corn with verticals just short of a couple hundred meters each run. For such a light ski, the Logics are already making me very happy! The rest of the family soon arrived and we took over the summit trig en masse for a picnic that seemed to last the better part of the day. The kids had fun on the luge with only one injury which is always a bonus (I am already facing large orthodontic bills with Charlotte).

There was good snow to the west through stunted snow gums, almost all the way down to the Diamantina Hut, and I also dropped into Avalanche and Dargo, but lots of ice.

We had a house-warming of sorts on Saturday night as Geelong soundly and appropriately whipped Port, and it was very relaxing next to the fire after Annie's superb curry.

Sunday morning we wandered down to Carmichael Falls for some pretty ice formations, and then the upper Vic River for a picnic and several futile attempts to wake up the odd lazy hibernating trout.

The best thing about the weekend after the weather though was seeing my kids playing with their cousins in the snow, just as we did with our cousins all those years ago!   

May ski-touring.

Pete and I got the season kick-started yesterday with a traditional Loch-Machinery-Red-Robin run out to watch the sunrise over Feathertop. After last week's early storm, there was more snow up high than on opening weekend last June. Whilst the cover had turned bomb-proof boilerplate, we were treated to a pretty spectacular sunrise after a week of bad weather. The track was pretty slick, and it was still very cold. After sunrise, we had coffee and breaky before heading back for a run off the summit testing out some new skis (Movement Logic with Plum tech bindings - 1.2kg!), however the ice still hadn't thawed and didn't look like softening - and so I got the training kite out for a run and was surprised at how quick I was up and running. With a bigger kite and snow that you can actually get an edge in, I can see that snow-kiting is going to be a blast. I'm hooked already.

Here's to a six-month season! 

NGV May 2013

You never have a bad day at the NGV with kids, even when mummy gets the dates wrong for the new Monet exposition (starts next week my love...) - and even when your youngest, so excited by French's stained glass ceiling, runs around and around until he clocks himself on one of the pillars and starts haemorrhaging uncontrollably over the artworks.

We had a good feed at Persimmon and the wombats were relatively adequately behaved, and got to see parts of the gallery that we might have otherwise glossed over in the dying stages of the Monet expo when all you want to do is get the kids the hell out of the way of yet another bored security guard trying to add a new dimension to his day.

Kohei Nawa's crystal encrusted deer is awesome, and the kids loved Boursier-Mougenot's floating bowls in the foyer, although the guards were particularly wary of our blood-stained boy.