Big White and the Big Flight!!

Well this will be the last entry to this blog!! I'm sitting on the couch at my place in Melb and I'm broke, jobless and frickin hot! The Australian summer is a big change from the sub zero temps of Canada this time of year!!

I'll run you through the last week of our trip since my last blog entry..

We got back to Rossland and unfortunately, there was still not much snow on Red Mountain.. We headed out to find some back country boarding with Benny, but conditions were not great. When we asked him what else they do around there when thry're waiting for snow, he told us Frisby Golf! Now I like frisby and I like golf, so it seemed the perfect thing to do on a snowless day in Canada. We grabbed some beers and a heap of frisbies that he had in his shed and headed up to the course. Yep, there's actually a local frisby golf course near his place!

The game goes exactly how it you think it would, teeing off from the tee area with your wood or low iron frisby, and going for the basket using a putter frisby for your short game.

Great times out there on the frisby golf course, with his dog mullet usually running off with someone's frisby every hole, and the rules were you had to play it from where Mullet dropped it :)

So with no snow in Rossland, we said goodbye to the sleepy little town one last time and headed up to Big White, near the town of Kelowna. We got a bus up to Kelowna and then hired another car for the trip to Big White to see Jaye. He had a sweet little pad, right on the mountain, where he was staying for the entire season and working in a restaraunt.

The mountain still wasn't open, but there was still plenty of snow around to do somw back country boarding, which is exactly what we did :) We headed up to a place called Snow Pines, where people had built a heap of jumps and half buried pipes in the ground to do grinds. We got some great airs and grinds going and then trekked up a massive hill and boarded down. Was very icy as it had been -10 deg C overnight and hadn't snowed in a couple of days. It made the landing a bit rough when we stacked, but all the more reason to make sure you made the jump!

The next day we went up to a nearby mountain called Revelstoke. I was about 3 hours away from Big White and was open for business! We caught the lift up, only to find we were 3 of only about 25 people on the entire mountain! It's only the 2nd season this mountan has been open, so it's all pretty new and undiscovered.. We spent the first few hours boarding on black runs that were extremely icy.. Not the best condiditions but still good times. We decided to explore a bit more of the mountain, above where the lifts can take you to. We saw a few guys climbing up to one of the summits, so we decided to follow. After a solid half hour of climbing almost vertical cliffs of snow, we finally made it to the top, only to realise that we might have been getting a little out of our depth! We were on a ridge, with the other side even steeper than the side we climbed up!!! There was only one way down tho, so we strapped in and went for it.. It was so steep, at one stage I stacked, did a full somersault, and kept on boarding! :) We found ourselves boarding down some real serious terrain, through trees and in about 50cm of the best untouched powder we'd ever seen! Was the best run of the day and not one of us even hit a tree :)

Worn out from the climb, we decided to explore some more of the lower runs, and found some great powder down there too. Was a wicked day at Revvy and some of the deepest powder I'll prob ever board. It was -17 deg C up the top of the mountain, so by the time we got to the car at the end of the day, we were ice blocks.. We headed home to defrost and got up early the next day to get our bus from Kelowna back to Vancover, the start of our big journey home...

With a 6 hour bus ride back to Vancouver, we were prettty dead when we got there. Vancouver was supposed to have a great nightlife and live music scene, but it would have to wait til our next trip there. We checked into a hotel and got a great sleep before our marathon plane ride(s) home to OZ. We flew out of Vancouver and after the 3 hour flight to Las Angeles, we had a 6 hour wait until our 15 and a half hour flight to Melbourne! It was a long 24 hours with not much sleep, but as soon as we landed in Melbourne, we pepped up again.

Was great to see my family and Shelly after so long, who were there to meet me at the airport. With no worries anymore about things like Malaria, yellow fever, food poisoning from eating old raw meet, having your bags stolen, losing your passport, living out of a suitcase, waiting at airports, figuring out where we were going to stay that night, traveller's diahreoa from dodgy water or running into trouble with the locals, IT WAS GREAT TO BE HOME!!

Don't get me wrong, the trip was a once in a lifetime opportunity and I enjoyed every minute of it, however after 5 months I was ready to come home..

I'll never forget this trip, or the people we met along the way who shared it with us. I've seen so many of the worlds wonders such as the Eiffel tower, the Vatican city and Sistine chapel, the Collosseum, the greek islands, Christ the Redeemer, the Copocobana, and even active volcanoes. I've surfed some of the worlds best waves and snowboarded some of the best powder on the planet. I found a lot of places I'd love to go back to one day, such as Germany, Switzerland, South and Central America, and of course Canada. There were a lot of places along the way that I was glad to see and experience, and although I had some great times there, I wouldn't necessarily go back, such as Las Vegas, Cancun and a lot of the real touristy places through Europe.

I experienced so many different cultures on my trip as well, especially through South and Central America. Seeing the kind of lifestyles some people lead really opens your eyes to how lucky we are in Australia and how good we really have it here. That's what travelling's all about though I guess. Seeing the world and discovering what you do and don't like and how you want to spend your time on this earth. I learnt a lot about myself and wouldn't change the trip or my life for anything.

So in the last few lines of this blog, I'm signing out from the trip of a lifetime and heading back into the real world, however I'm taking my new perspecting on life with me and I'm going to make sure I make the most of every day and live life to the fullest. Before this blog started, I had a travel diary to write this stuff down in and in the front page was a quote which sort of ended up being the moto of my trip. It was "Make each day your masterpiece" and from now, on I think I will :)

Until my next quarter life crises or crazy surfing trip, its goodbye.. :)