We’ve now been at SilverStar 17 days and I have been able to do 17 days of skiing. It was a mix of downhill and cross country and some days were short skis or only half days, but this is indeed way beyond a record for me, AND the record in the family.

Steve was following a similar streak but his ended yesterday when he instead indulged the younger two kids in some awesome outside play as an alternative to skiing on a very windy day. He may in fact have won “father of the year” for this – check out this sample video below of what they were up to:

Although the snow fall has not been stellar, we are happy to have lots more snow than most mountains in the country and the conditions have been remarkably good. It’s also been super fun to have friends come and join us skiing, which is one of the reasons we purchased a house this size.

Our dear friends from San Carlos, California made the trip up to ski in Canada for the first time. Sadly on the first morning of skiing, one of our friends broke their leg skiing, so the trip ended early 😦 😦 but it was great to spend time with the family nonetheless. The accident did teach us 4 interesting things:
1) The SilverStar ski patrol is amazing and have some very slick gear to get the injured down the mountain safely. Hope we never have to use it, but definitely good to know.
2) The Vernon hospital is understaffed and inefficient (will feel just like home to Ontario-ans)
3) Despite #2, the Vernon hospital ER doctors are great and get top grades for their casts. I assume they get a lot of practice!?
4) Paying out of pocket for ER services in Canada is less than 10% of the cost of ER services in the US, as we were able to do a direct comparison to Steve’s ER visit in Colorado in September.

We were also very lucky to have the Ford / Saint-Laurent trio visit us from Vancouver for a couple of days. They all snowboard, so it was good to see the mountain from the eyes of riders and realize how much traversing there is here to get around to the cool slopes!! Lastly our friend and neighbour, Nooshin, from Toronto stopped by today to say hello.

And it hasn’t all been skiing here. The big kids brought their speed skating gear so they guest skated at a couple of local clubs (see post on guest skating here) and Lucas and I played hockey on the pond here. Zachary successfully finished his grade 7 music theory online course which, in combination with his grade 7 piano he completed in January, gives him his first high school credit. Steve and I imparted our finely-tuned exam writing wisdom on Zachary and taught him how to cram quickly and write the exam as soon as possible before forgetting everything… and it worked! We’ve also been figuring out the last of our travel plans for the “real” travel coming up soon. We are leaving for Japan on Thursday… eek!