After a great start to the season, it took until the last day to know whether it was going to be a single season in the Premier League for Hull City, or whether a repeat was on the cards…
But, there we are, nestling just above Newcastle, Middlesborough and West Bromwich Albion and all ready for season 2
Last birthday I decided to write myself a set of “resolutions”, or more probably intentions for the year in which I was 36.
Those intentions were:
So, 13 months later, and looking back, how did I do?
I haven’t got a list for this year, so maybe it should be something I reserve for even years 🙂
It is 8 weeks since we brought Skitters home and she has settled in well. In that time, we’ve become really interested in low tide times (because sand appears near the West Pier and Skitters can have a great run), we’ve tried out lots of treats and come up with a short list (dried liver, sausages and schmackos), Richard has taught her to fetch, and a combination of me and Richard’s Dad have taught her to shake hands.
Skitters has visited Hull, and met my Dad, and she’s been to Margate and met Richard’s family. She travels well, and settles down and sleeps in the back of the car.
We have both increased our exerise, I’ve decided not to run the 10K I was planning to in July because I just don’t have the spare energy at the moment. I’ve tracked a lot of walks on my Garmin Forerunner watch and know that I’m averaging about 20 miles per week. Some of the favourite spots are Stanmer Park and the woods beyond (1, 2, 3, 4), the River Adur (1, 2), and any beach (1, 2, 3, 4, 5).
We’re on to leads number 3 and 4 after she chewed her way through 2 retracting leads. She now has a shortish lead, that matches her collar, for when she’s the dog-around-town, and a 10m long line for when we’re out and about and there are too many interesting smells around to let her off the lead. Yesterday we lost her for a while as she’d gone sniffing in amongst some brambles, she seemed to have got stuck and we were trying to work out how to get her out, when Richard spotted her running off. Somehow she’d managed to get out of her harness, without undoing it (the straps have been tightened up now!). She ran off and ended up in a field of horses before trying to find her way back to us – which she did, covered in mud and looking absolutely exhausted. But this goes to show that she’s not ready to be off the lead all the time yet – she still prioritises rabbits, squirrels and birds above us.
So, in 8 weeks I’ve spent less time at the keyboard, spent a lot of time learning how to take photos of a small dog, and have had a lot more exercise and seen the beach in a morning a lot more. It has been great fun.
Richard and I have long talked about getting a dog, but it never felt like the time was right due to work commitments, the size of our garden, our work patterns etc. This year we decided to give it some proper thought and in January decided to go to our nearest Dogs Trust centre in Shoreham to find out more. When we talked to one of the staff they told us that there are dogs which can suit all manner of house sizes and that we should fill in the form and take it from there. We decided to do this, but to wait till after our snowboarding holiday in Morzine (on which probably more in another blog post).
Last Sunday we headed off with our completed form in our hands and handed it in. The next stage was to go and look at the dogs in the centre and see if we there any we liked the sound and look of (each dog has an information sheet telling you whether it can live with children, and if so what age, whether it gets on well with other dogs etc). Although we didn’t need a dog that can live with children, we have family and friends with children ranging from 2 to 13 and so the children rating was important to us. We spotted a couple of dogs we liked the look of, one beagle cross and another one, and then headed back to the front desk where Emma, one of the assistants, was waiting for us. She told us more about the dogs, and neither of them were suitable, but she did have “one in the back” that we could find out more about. This dog, Skitters, had been brought back that day as the chief exerciser in her new family had been taken ill and they couldn’t look after her any more. She had been handed in to Shoreham as a stray in February, had then been adopted by her new family and handed back 3 or so weeks later. We took her out for a walk, and got on well with her. She matched our questionnaire well and we decided to adopt her. She is a Jack Russell Terrier crossed with something a bit larger judging by her size. Having made our decision the next stages for us were to take her out for a second walk, have a house visit from animal welfare who provided all sorts of helpful information including a helpful map of Brighton places which are and are not dog friendly, and attend a rehoming talk.
Having done everything necessary we went yesterday and collected her and brought her home to Brighton. We had a lovely long walk along the beach (does anyone know if sea sponges are toxic for small dogs? because she loves them…) and no sooner had we got home than she fell asleep on my lap. After lots more exploring and sniffing around the house she seems to have settled down well and is currently snuggled up on Richard’s knees looking completely at home.
Last week was Brighton Science Festival and we managed to get to 2 events, although we did attempt a third.
The first one we attempted was the Cafe Scientifique festival special on “The Frog who Croaked Blue: Synesthesia and the Mixing of the Senses”. But we arrived too late and saw 
on the door and so had to make do with a glass of wine in Browns instead…
Next up was the Big Space Show which consisted of 3 parts. The first was comedienne Helen Keen performing her show It Is Rocket Science which was an amusing and quirky look at space, rockets and science.
All in all, a great evening of learning.
The last event we attended was Big Science Saturday, a day of science talks and demonstrations.
Our first talk was The Science of Superheroes, a humourous and entertaining look into how the superheroes superpowers could be replicated in the real world. The most amazing of which, at least for me, was invisibility.
Next was Dr Harry Witchel on The Secret Language of Negotiation which was an interesting introduction to tells and signs with some video footage to back these things up.
Final talk of the day was Ben Goldacre who allowed the audience to choose which talk he should do in a “choose your own adventure” style. He was fascinating, passionate and knowledgeable and we’ve since bought a copy of his book to peruse in our own time. Highlights for me were the formulas of “how to
If my teachers at school, or at least one in particular, had shown as much passion for his subject as the speakers did I might have managed to leave school with a science qualification. As it was, my Physics teacher announced on the first day of our GCSE course that “as far as I’m concerned women are only here to give pleasure to me and give birth to my children and I don’t see why I should teach you physics” which I’m sure you’ll agree is a great start to a 2 year course and something that affected my relationship with science. These type of events are a great way for me to reconnect.
I was just about to write a blog post about our week in Les Arcs last week, when I realised we’d never blogged about last years Big Trip. So here it is, better late than never. I’ve created 5 blog posts, one for each of the 5 different states we visited as this blog post was getting way too long, so follow the links in the list below to find out more about each state.
Last February Richard and I headed off on an adventure, a month in the US/Canada, mainly based at or near snowboarding/ski resorts. We decided to fly as far West as we needed to, and head back inland over the course of a month. We’d started planning by buying a map of the US, and attaching post-it notes to the cities with airports, and working out where we could get to by plane. We sat down and consulted the internet, and copies of the World Snowboard Guide and Ski Snowboard America to find a shortlist of resorts to aim for and then started plugging together a month’s worth of flights, car hire and accommodation.
The states we visited over that month were:
There are a whole heap of GPS traces from our various snow days, and by my reckoning (with a bit of help from my Nokia 6110 Navigator and Sportstracker) we covered 506.09 miles on lifts and boards over 21 days on the slopes at 11 different resorts. We also ended up with a lot of photos and a couple of videos.
A great, great time, and something I’d love to repeat when I’ve saved up some more pennies.
This was the fifth and final place we stayed on our BigTrip.
The drive from Big Sky to Jackson took us past the incredible Yellowstone National Park – if our drive had been shorter, and it hadn’t been snowing, we’d have popped in to the park to take a look – maybe next time! Our accommodation in Jackson was at the Elk Country Inn, a reasonably well equipped log cabin within an easy, if cold (-20 deg C) walk of the many restaurants and shops.
Our first stop was Jackson Hole, a resort we’ve heard a lot about, but which we found somewhat disappointing. Yes, it was steep, but that was about it. No tree runs like we’d found at Moonlight, it was busy – even when it snowed it got tracked out really quickly, and I think we’d been totally spoilt by Montana. But we still had fun on our 2 days, and celebrated Richard’s 40th birthday there.
The next day we headed off to Grand Targhee, in deep, fresh, powder, with really limited visibility. I wasn’t feeling great, and so we only managed a half day, but we had some great fun playing amongst the trees with almost no idea what runs we were on, and where we were heading for. After a day off for me to attempt a recovery, we returned to Grand Targhee, on a day when we could see and managed a couple of runs before I had to retire ill. It was a very different experience the second day, and we realised that Grand Targhee isn’t a very big hill, but it gets a huge amount of snow.
Wyoming was a bit of a disappointment – we’d expected Jackson to be amazing – it was the last stop on our trip because we wanted to improve so we were good enough to appreciate it based on it’s reputation. Maybe we didn’t reach a high enough level, or maybe we peaked at Montana and learnt more about what makes the perfect snowboard resort for us, but Wyoming wasn’t the amazing final stop we’d planned.
From my sportstracker log in Wyoming we did:
A total for Wyoming of 64.23 miles.
This was the fourth place we stayed on our BigTrip and my favourite.
After leaving Lookout Pass, we drove into Missoula for the weekend, staying at the lovely Gibson Mansion bed and breakfast – the only place I’ve stayed which has a pre-breakfast tray delivered to the room, followed by a freshly cooked breakfast in the dining room. We’d decided that by this stage in our trip we were bound to want a break from the snow. The first thing we did on Saturday morning, however, was to get kitted up and head over to Montana Snowbowl to take a look. We did, and decided that the conditions didn’t look that great, and that we would, afterall, have that day off. So we spent the day wandering around Missoula, stocking up on gifts and postcards and the like, trying beers at the Big Sky Brewery before eating at the lovely, but hard to find, Red Bird restaurant.
After another incredible breakfast we headed from Missoula to Big Sky resort and our room at the Lodge at Big Sky. First impressions weren’t good, the room was big but soulless, there was no crockery or cutlery in our room despite the “basic kitchen facilities” (microwave and sink) and it was all beige – it looked a bit like a travelodge. Breakfast was a communal buffet style effort, served on paper plates with plastic cutlery. Again, not great.
But, we weren’t there for the accommodation (fortunately), we were there for the snowboarding and our first day was spent in fresh snow at Big Sky in conditions that are hard to beat. Our second day was clear and bright and so we made the hour long trip to Bridger Bowl for another fun day on the slopes, still finding patches of fresh snow to play in. Day three and a visit to Moonlight Basin, a resort which shares terrain and lift passes with Big Sky and which was my favourite resort of our entire trip – a resort with some amazing gladed tree black runs, and very few people. More fresh snow fell, and we re-visited both Moonlight Basin and Big Sky – having more great days at both.
Montana had great snow conditions, and some really good resorts – both Moonlight Basin and Big Sky are worth a return to, and even Bridger Bowl would amuse for another day. I’d probably base myself at Moonlight as it seemed to have a wider variety of self-catering accommodation than Big Sky.
From my sportstracker log in Montana we did:
A total for Montana of 161.02 miles.
This was the third place we stayed on our BigTrip.
When we were planning for the trip, we wanted to visit a lot of lesser known resorts, and places that were hard to get to from the UK without changing planes etc. We knew we wanted to go to Oregon, and to Montana, and so Idaho seemed like a good place to visit that was between the two.
The Red Express dropped us back at Spokane airport, and we collected our car for the next 17 days.
We’d decided to visit Silver Mountain – I’m not sure why Silver won out over Schweitzer but it did. We found ourselves some lovely, lovely lodging at the Morning Star lodge and had treated ourselves to a larger room so that we could have some domestic extras – like a washing machine and a fully equipped kitchen.
Silver Mountain isn’t really a destination resort – but it kept us busy for a couple of days. The snow could have been better, but it would have been hard to have had much more of the mountain to ourselves, the biggest lift queue saw us waiting for 10 people to load ahead of us – some of the lifts are a bit old but with the level of traffic it wasn’t a problem. There is a 20 minute or so gondola ride to get from Kellogg to Silver mountain but this was quick and new and caused us no issues.
Whilst we were in Idaho, it was a total lunar eclipse, so we stood outside in the freezing cold to watch some of it, before heading off to nearby Noah’s canteen to warm up again.
Would I visit again? Well I’d pop in for a couple of days on the way to somewhere else again.
As we left Idaho to head to Montana we decided, thanks to an OnTheSnow review I’d read, to pop into Lookout Pass – a small mountain on the border between Idaho and Montana. We spent a few hours exploring and playing in amongst trees before leaving Idaho behind us and moving on to Montana.
From my sportstracker log in Idaho we did:
A total for Idaho of 60.75 miles.
This was our second stop in our Big Trip.
We were concerned at how busy US resorts would be over Presidents Day weekend and so decided to hop over the border into Canada. We wanted to concentrate our trip on places that were hard to get to directly from the UK — what is the point in having a month in the US/Canada if you go somewhere that is a one hop flight? — so that ruled out Whistler. After a bit of research we decided on Red Mountain, British Columbia, and decided to base ourselves there for a long weekend. We flew from Portland, Oregon to Spokane, Idaho and took the Red Express bus service over to Red Mountain. This bus service worked out really well for us and saved us having the hassle of taking rental cars over national borders.
We stayed at the Ram’s Head Inn, a bed and breakfast at the resort, rather than down in Rossland. It isn’t quite ski-in/ski-out but there isn’t a long way to walk to get to the lifts.
On our first morning we were offered the inn’s free ski passes for the day which is a great way to start a trip. There was a lot of races going on on Red Mountain itself, but having spent a few hours on Red Mountain we decided that Granite Mountain was the one for us — especially the back bowl (Paradise basin) near the struggling Paradise lift (it was on restricted capacity when it was running). There is a really lovely area called the mini bowls on the trail map which is graded blue and which is just spaced out trees with snow in between. This was my favourite area, and started my love for fresh snow and gladed tree runs together.
Overall, an enjoyable few days, the unreliability of the lifts caused problems and what lifts were working were generally pretty old. We exhausted all the restaurants during our stay, and if we were to return then we’d probably opt for self-catering rather than bed and breakfast. The breakfast was good at the Ram’s Head Inn, but the ability to cook does give some extra options.
From my sportstracker log, at Red Mountain we did:
A British Columbia total of 108.01 miles.