Snowboarding

Yesterday, was our long awaited snowboarding lessons. Since arriving in Anchorage, we made the decision that our best chance at becoming professional snowboarders would have to start with basic lessons. Both Kelli and I have tried snowboarding before without ANY success. Our last attempt ended after about 25 yards. Most people would talk about how long they did something such as snowboard in measurements of time. Not us, not the Stannards. We measure our success in distance. Poor Kelli was only able to go in one direction, which just happened to be off the side of the trail. I, on the other hand, could go down the hill, but was unable to stop without falling. So as you see, lessons were our only way to the top of the snowboarding .

Our lessons started as any would. We met our instructor who was a very friendly girl, probably in her early twenties. I think that she assumed that because we were probably her oldest students in a long while, if not ever, that we were going to be more experienced and therefore, easier to teach. Boy was she wrong. As all of the little fourteen year olds sped past us down the hill, we remained on the bunny slope walking up the hill and falling down. As our learned skills moved from from pushing ourselves on flat surfaces to completing an "S" curve down the hill, Our actual skill set was stuck at strapping into our board. By the end of our one hour lesson, neither of us could make it down the bunny slope in one smooth ride.

At one point in our lessons, I was pretty sure that Kelli had caused herself some serious brain injury or obtained a skull fracture. During one of our runs down the hill, Kelli decided that her best way to stop would be to give up and fall. Of course, instead of falling forward up the hill, she felt as though the best bet would be to fall backwards, down the hill, smashing her head in the process. Fortunately, the snow was soft enough to break her fall and other than a little whip lash, she was ok. I on the other hand sustained no injuries. I did however amaze myself with the revelation that I can in fact sweat in 9 degrees. I never would have thought that I could actually freeze my beard and hair with sweat. It only took about 20 minutes before my beard had icicles and my hair was frozen like I had used super strength hair gel. By the end of our lessons, I was ready to strip down to a t-shirt and shorts, and Kelli needed a heating pad.

On the drive home, we came to the realization that our best chances into the winter Olympics unfortunately would not come from snowboarding, but instead would have to be changed to downhill skiing. We decided that we needed to drown our sorrows of defeat with some local beer and food at the Brewhouse. Lucky for us we made one of the last few days of the barley wine festival were we were able to try our first glasses of barley wine, a drink that can best be described as a beer, wine, and whiskey mixture. Barley wine is in fact a beer as it is made from grains, but it's aged in old liquor barrels, usually whiskey which gives it sweeter more intense flavors. It was a nice end to a tough day. Better luck to us next time we plan on hitting the slopes.

Sorry, we didn't have time to take any pictures, we were too busy trying not to kill ourselves.