Hitting the slopes....literally!

Learning to snow board is turning out to be quite a mission! I went up to a place called Porter’s Heights on Wednesday with my friend Tim and his brother Rob and we had fantastic weather with good visibility and sunshine all day. I would be not be being entirely honest if I told you that I enjoyed every minute, since I found spending most of my time on my butt quite demoralising at times and needed a lot of encouragement to keep going! The boys were really great at championing my cause which made things a lot easier and after a lot of hard work, by the end of the day I could actually turn and come down the intermediate slope without falling over, which was quite an achievement for me!

I think I really tried Tim and Rob’s patience since they kept having to take me back to the car to change my snow board around; first of all my bindings were too loose, then when we got back on the slopes I decided that I was goofy (when you ride with the right foot first) so Rob took me back down to change the board around….but once he had, I decided that I was definitely regular (riding with your left foot first)….this time Tim helped to sort me out....(!) I admitted that I was quite high maintenance; the boy’s handled it all very well; they said having two sisters helped (don’t know what that had to do with anything though!).

On the way home once we had descended the extremely steep hill and were just about to get onto the main road when I suddenly remembered that I had left my new, $450 contact lenses at the top….it was nearly the end of a beautiful friendship let me tell you! Tim was not sure that his 1986 Toyota would make it up the steep incline twice in one day, thankfully it did not die on us! Ah well, I like to think I make up for it with my bubbly personality, good looks and charm…. ahem!

We all tried to go up the slopes again on Friday with another guy called Richard, however once we got there we discovered that the weather was not very good with reports that it was going to get worse with more snow and high winds so since we didn’t have any chains for the car we decided to turn back while we still could. Instead of snow boarding we spent the day in Christchurch wandering around the art gallery and the botanic gardens in Hagely park in the warm sun, it’s amazing how completely different the weather in the mountains can be from the city.

Last night the Navs group had a bit of a social gathering and so I went along for a while and caught up with some of the guys, which was great, I actually didn’t feel like socialising but I really want to hang out with the guys as often as possible and get to know them all better. I enjoyed the night.

My flights to Sydney are booked and I’m flying over next Thursday for a Navs conference which I am really looking forward to! The speakers are Paul Stanley on the topic of Leadership, and related issues in workshops and Tom Yeakley who has recently retired from being the US Collegiate Ministry's Leader, both really good people I hear.

Hope you all have a good weekend, by the way feel free to pass this website address onto anyone else you think would like to see what I’ve been up to.

Later! From Ayley