Eva rolling around on the floor while watching us pack. I'm going to miss those little fluff balls!
My trip out (with Seth and Kelsey) turned into quite the extended and frustrating adventure. We left Fort Kent on Tuesday and made the 5 hour drive to Portland for a morning flight on Wednesday. Wednesday dawned calm and incredibly foggy, yielding a couple hours worth of delays before they finally canceled our flight down to Newark. Turns out it was canceled due to combination of a pilot who didn't have enough experience landing on only instruments and a plane with a guidance system not accurate enough to (be guaranteed to) find the runway in such conditions. Maybe I'm glad they canceled it….
After much hassle trying to reclaim our checked bags (all nine of them) we rebooked out of Boston for Thursday morning and got a hotel for the night. The trip to Boston (via bus from Portland) was smooth and easy. They bring you right to the gate and you don't have to hassle with parking or navigating that lovely morning rush hour traffic that we don't have in Fort Kent. Our flight from Boston went out right on time, putting us into Chicago for a scheduled four hour layover that turned into six before we finally boarded for our final leg to Calgary.
LLBean in Freeport….a great place to go chill out for a while when your flights get canceled!
Artsy shot from the Chicago airport.
Chicago has a hydroponic garden upstairs that made for a sunny spot to sit on a cloudy day.
After a half hour or so of waiting they finally shoved us off from the gate and toward the runway. Then we sat. And sat. And sat. And when we finally moved it was a 180 degree turn back toward the gate to get de-iced since we'd sat too long on the tarmac allowing a brief snow squall to stick flakes on the wings.
When we made the 180 back to the gate….Kelsey wasn't psyched.
When we got up in Canmore on Friday….quite the transition to winter!
We knew it was going to be cold in Canada but leaving the airport building in Calgary was a bit of a shock. Unsure of the accuracy of our iPhones, there's still a debate about how cold it actually was, but my phone said -17F on Friday morning when we got up here in Canmore. Quite the shock from the 50 degrees we had last weekend for the Lobster Roll race on North Haven Island. Needless to say, I had almost all of my clothes on for our first ski that day. Thankfully the sun has been incredibly consistent so the temps have been manageable for the most part. Today, tomorrow and Wednesday we're actually supposed to have really warm weather (35-40 F) but I'm sitting in the nordic center (their internet is much more consistent that at our hotel) right now and the people skiing by outside are bundled right up so I'm guess it's not that warm yet!
In Canmore you can store your frozen turkey in the back of your truck…
So far training has gone really well. My first day I did one session classic in the morning and then took to my skate stuff in the afternoon. My new Alpina boots are awesome…no having to adjust them this year. Perfect right out of the box! I've only skied once on my new skis since we had them stone ground so we're (and by "we" I mean Seth) are getting them saturated before i use them too much. They were great although two of the three pairs are for warmer temperatures than we have had so far. Maybe they'll feel nicer tomorrow!
Snowmaking on a clear (COLD) sunny day at the Canmore Nordic Center. They have upwards of 60 snow guns here so when it's cold they absolutely churn out the snow. From my view in the lodge today I can already see new terrain that wasn't open when we trained yesterday…can't wait to ski tomorrow!
The first day we were here Casey jumped in with the Canadians for his second race of the season and third day on snow. He drove a family truck up from his home in Washington so he's been here two days long than me.
Brian and I were psyched with the sun and snow….can you tell?
Casey taking a turn on the penalty loop. He shot (1,1 - two total misses out of ten shots taken) in his second race…pretty strong start to the season!
Camera+ at work: the top shot (out our bedroom window in Fort Kent) hasn't been played with. The bottom shot was after I toyed with it in Camera+. Fun, huh?
A hat I made for myself right before we left Maine. Rumor has it that our new MWSC suits from Borah will have some pink on the women's version so I added pink with the blues to make it MWSC colors!
One had underway already here in Canmore...
Seth testing out a sample suit from Borah in the kitchen (he did ski in it before dinner)…dinner was aerodynamically efficient!
I am the proud owner of a season's pass here at CNC….and I've been renamed.
The Inukshuk right outside our hotel in town. These supposedly line the coast in the far north as safety beacons to boats offshore. It was also a kind of symbol for the Vancouver Olympics in 2010. You can't tell from this photo, but this guy is probably about 12 feet tall!
My favorite bridge in Canmore…I'm pretty sure I take 10-15 photos of this thing every time I come here.
A panorama taken from inside the nordic center.
A stairway connecting segments of the public walking trails to the biking and ski trails.
The Bow River.
Looking South from the gorgeous bridge.
The local kids love playing on the piles of manmade snow before the groomers push them out at night.
Looking southeast before morning training.
Brian atop one of the snow piles after training yesterday.
The biathlon range with the Canadian Rocky Mountains in the background.
Yesterday we did strength at a gym in town…turns out it's quite the hotspot for indoor climbing.
Yesterday was a busy day on Frozen Thunder (their name for the early season trail made from snow saved over the summer months). On the weekends the trail is open all day to the public so our first set of intervals involved some dodging of moving obstacles!
Stay tuned for more updates!
I've been posting pictures on twitter (@KatrinaMHowe) and instagram (katreeenamarie) daily.
Check there for more regular news!
No comments:
Post a Comment