Skeee

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so we have arrived in the adventure capital of the world: Queenstown, New Zealand. This town has more insane activities than i have even heard of all gathered together in one tremendous "Lifes short-play hard" sorta town. For starters, this is where A.J. Hackett invented bunjee...so we went to this sacred birthplace and watched a few blokes tumble off a bridge. Did we do it? no. we both have told ourselves it is too expensive and we have no money...which is true...but also part of me is weeny of course. It also has some variations of this like bunjee from a helicopter 500m up, a swinging gondola in the middle of a canyon or from a descending para-glider. eek. This only grazes the surface of the ba-zillion amazing and highly expensive life-flashing-before-your-eyes activies. So being on an extreme budget at this point...we chose good ol skiiig. It was highly beautiful...and definatly the best skiing i have done. Fortunatly we got a bit of powder snow to cover the ice pre-made of the previous days...so the conditions were not so bad....despite the warmth of the day. Another coolness factor of this was that we skiied very near some of the places where they shot lord of the rings. The mountains next to us..."The Remarkables" was the location for Mount Doom among other places...as well as the Shotover river was the place for many river scenes. Some not so good features of skiiing were...we tried snow-boarding at first. I thought that my reasonable skiing experience would translate..not to mention my gnarly skateboarding chops...but alas i was massively wrong. We both crashed and burned on the baby slopes. so bad in fact we gave up...with the mind that we would have no fun and not enjoy any of the Real New Zealand slopes. So we slapped on the trusty skis and rocked. I did my first Black Diamond(2nd hardest slope rating) and did not fall.Yipeee! Also...a silly thing happened. On the way up a very long ski lift, my ski got caught in a patch of snow at the bottom and clicked offf. eekk! we tried shouting at others to pick it up...but to no avail. so about 30 min later somebody kindly brought it up to me. silliness. overall a wonderful time. rock.
=brad

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