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It occurred to me that this blog has for a long time now been neglected. Over 18 months without a single post. While I constantly procrastinated over making that reviving post, I possibly felt content in knowing that most people are being kept up to date via tidbits posted through other means such as Facebook, Flickr, etc. Much has happened in this time. I am undecided to whether I’ll write some back posts to fill in the gap or simply write a summary.

Though what better way than to reawaken the blog than with a post about skiing. Skiing was a sport that I was introduced to at a particularly young age. Before I had even started school, dad had me snow plowing down Easy Street on the Big D at Mount Hotham. However, until last year I hadn’t skied for nine years. We skied every year when I was a kid until I was eight, when our skiing holidays began getting shorter and less frequent. We skipped a year, then at age ten we had our last family skiing trip, only it wasn’t even the whole family and we only had about four days. Finally in Year 9, I managed to convince dad to send me on the ski camp to Mount Buller, though again, the four days were barely enough to regain my previous level of skiing, let alone make progress.

As the years went by, the opportunity to ski never arose. Until finally last year I was able to do eight days of skiing at three different resorts; a weekend at Falls Creek, five days at Hotham and a day at Mount Buller. Not a bad effort considering I hadn’t skied for the previous nine years.

This year i’ve already done a weeks worth of skiing Hotham and a weekend at Falls Creek. In this time I’ve skied some new terrain, such as the Orchard, an area of Mount Hotham that just wasn’t lifted when I was a kid. Of course there are some runs that I haven’t skied before that have been there all along, such as Imagine, although it now has snow making and is groomed. While at Falls Creek I did some of the runs around International (named because of the incredibly long Poma?). I must say how much things have changed at Hotham as well. I certainly remember a time when the resort generator used to pack itself in every so often though now connected to the grid instead, resort transport consisted of an open trailer towed by a tractor known as a ‘zoo cart’ since replaced by buses, the road was unsealed and there was certainly no snow making, etc.

Finally, I am back up at Mount Hotham one more time as I finish off writing this post on a rather impromptu trip. Having purchased a season pass already (it was already cheaper), I did have in mind the idea of making one more trip. So when I heard that someone was going up and that the lodge was empty, the first thing I did was to put on some washing and make some preparations for packing my bag. Furthermore, I have plans for a bit more skiing in New Zealand and some more in Europe as well. Definitely making up for the lack of skiing over the last nine years. Now to hope that I don’t run out of money!