Bad luck with weather

I was @ Ruka, Kuusamo again last week with my family. On Saturday the weather was great, -4 C, sun shining and no wind, and the slopes were in a very good shape. It totally looked like my luck with weathers had changed. But then on Sunday the weather was terrible, wind blowing so that the bubble ski lifts had to be closed and it was totally impossible to glide the east side slopes as the wind was freezing your face and throwing ice on it. So we were forced to stay on the west side slopes which was good in the sense that now the whole family is experienced on skiing/snow boarding on black slopes :)

As a summary of the snowboarding this season I have to say that I learned to do it better than before as I have never done that as much as this winter. My son learned to ski very well, he's doing great carving turns even on the steep slopes. My daughter also learned really snowboard. When the season started she was still sliding sideways and only doing the easiest blue slopes. Now she can easily do the red slopes and somehow handle even black ones. My wife got also better with carvers.
As total I was on snowboard on 9 days, 8 in Ruka and 1 in Iso-Syöte. Of these days the weather was nice only on one, last Saturday. In addition the weather was decent on one or two days but 6 days out of 9 it was lousy. I experienced raining, heavy snowing, horrible winds, very cold temperature and all sorts of mixes of these. I hope the luck with weather is better next winter.

Busy Saturday

So I was @ Iso-Syöte on Saturday with my family. My daughter learned to snowboard a lot better than before. Now she can actually make several turns in a row without turning the board sideways first. And my son has become too fast on skis for my wife...she can't keep up with him :)

I finally got to test ride the old and used Burton Custom, my new Burton boots and Giro helmet (see couple of earlier blog entries). The boots were fantastic and the helmet was ok. For the first hour or so I had some problems with the left boot as my little toe was getting numb, but then I guess the boot adjusted to my foot. The Giro helmet was otherwise great but my goggles didn't fit with it perfectly. The old Burton Custom board doesn't really look too pretty and it has some scratches on it, but boy how great it was to ride compared to the rental boards I've only ridden so far. I might actually buy it.

At the Saturday evening we were back to Oulu and we went out with my wife. First we had dinner in Marrakech restaurant which was great. Not only the food was tasteful and the Menu dishes huge, they also had belly dance performances :)
After the dinner we went to see Angelit concert. They were good as always but by far the best thing about the concert was that there were a lot of people from Utsjoki that now live in Oulu.

Used Burton Custom

I've got a used Burton Custom snow board from a colleague of mine so I can test ride it to see if I want to buy it. It does have marks of usage on it but it doesn't look too bad. I'm looking forward to give it a try. Maybe next weekend in Iso-Syöte.