Snow, a visitor & last ski

For my last day of work at Lafarge, I got the hardest commute I've had yet.  When I got up on Friday morning I quite surprised to see that a foot of snow had dumped overnight.  My car looked like this:

The roads hadn't been ploughed, so it was a slow & tricky drive in to work.  The day warmed quickly & in the afternoon most of the snow had melted off.  Friday was a nice day at work, a good lunch with the maintenance staff, a lovely card, lots of gifts & plenty of well-wishes.

My last ski at Sunshine was Saturday morning - it was nice & warm & very empty.  Unfortunately, the runs were still pretty icy by the time I left.  Still, I have good memories of my skiing improving by orders of magnitude there & I've forgotten just how many times I went this season - definitely got my money's worth from the season pass.

After what can be considered a sleep-in on Sunday morning, I hiked off to Calgary (it's been a while, thankfully) to pick-up (my aunt) Valerie from the airport.  Air Canada, true to form, had managed to put her bag on a later Vancouver-Calgary flight; hence, we waited around for another hour.  It's really nice after a year here to have a visitor & not having to poach other people's visitors.  Various road-trip planning discussions ensued - we still have a bit to organise.

With all the snow that's been around, Lake Louise is staying open an extra week.  In an act of generosity/scheming-to-poach-Sunshine-passholders-for-next-winter, all North American resort season passes are good this week.  Today Valerie & I headed out to Louise with Megan, Alex & Finn at a very reasonable hour.  The sun was out in the morning & gradually melted some of the ice off the runs at the top of the hill.  We took turns minding Finn as we went up & explored a little.  We weren't up for anything extreme, but had a most enjoyable time skiing around on various amounts of slushy snow.  It was quite different to what I'm used to, but all good fun.  Rock stars that we are, Alex & I posed for photos with Asian tourists/sightseers at the top of the gondola - we must have looked the part.  It was nice skiing somewhere different with big views out over the Bow Valley to Lake Louise & Mt Temple.

 We popped over to Lake Louise so Valerie could walk on a lake for a little while.