I struggled out of bed Saturday morning, even worse than I normally do. I had taken an age to fall asleep so waking up at 6:30 was a bit tough. I eventually got moving, showered, dressed in my ski gear and shoved my contacts in. Can I just say, putting contacts in while your eyes have barely woken up feels awful.
Glen and I walked to the subway station. It was snowing in Toronto as it was at the hill. It was going to be a great day for skiing. We caught the subway to York Mills, the coach arrived shortly after and we boarded with Umberto. Bec and Al had saved us seats. We settled in and set off.
The coach drove slower than usual up to Mount St Louis Moonstone because the roads were icy. Smart move. We arrived at about 9:15/9:30. Glen and I hired skis, stowed our stuff and got outside with time to get in two runs before the lesson.
It wasn’t busy at that time of the morning, which was excellent for the queues on the lifts. The snow was lovely and soft and fresh. It was a pleasure to ski through it. We did two runs on some greens then skied down to where the lessons commenced.
Glen, Bec and I are all in level four. There were a lot of fours so we nominated ourselves as being more advanced than the average level four and got grouped together with our instructor, Ahmed. We also had a Danish bloke called Kim (who was gorgeous) join us.
Ahmed took us to some greens so we could practise an exercise whereby we had to pump our inside ski up and down while turning so as to force us to balance and put all our weight on the downhill ski. From pumping (we looked like rabbits) we moved to lifting then holding up our leg (like a dog peeing in a way) and from there to just raising it a couple of millimetres off the ground.
I found it an incredibly useful exercise and my last couple of normal runs for the lesson felt great. The three of us finished feeling very positive about our lesson. It’s been a while since I’ve had one where I came away feeling like I learned something,
We went in for lunch at 12. Bec and Al brought their little camp stove thing to heat up a proper stew type meal. Glen and I had baguette with ham/turkey and accompaniments. I’d also made Anzac biscuits the day before. I’d made them with gluten free flour (because of Al) but because they lacked the binding agent, the ended up spread out on the tray and very thin. They looked like brandy snaps and could almost be made into biscuits. Despite their appearance, they tasted delicious. Can’t go wrong with three types of sugar.
We stuffed our faces and rested for a couple of hours before hitting the slopes again. I think we covered all black and blue runs on both sides of the ‘mountain’. We also went over to the terrain park as Al and Umberto were keen to do it. Bec and Glen didn’t try it but I had a go. The first jump was fine. The second I stacked it and lost my skis. The guy behind did too because he couldn’t manoeuvre around me. I got it on film. I’m glad I gave it a go, even if it wasn’t successful from start to finish.
Bec, Glen and Al skied until just after 4, while Umberto and I got in a couple more runs before 4:30. It was getting dark by then and we were getting tired so we went in. It hadn’t stopped snowing all day so it was a great day to be out there.
We ate more food afterwards, mostly bad things like biscuits and toblerone, and played a game of Sushi, Go! before boarding the coach at 5:30 and leaving at 6. It took quite a while to get home because the coach went very slowly on snow covered roads. I wore my seatbelt.
We arrived home at about 8, ate leftovers and watched some tv before climbing into bed seeking rest.
Travels with Dan 
What do you say, eh?