A Nice Weekend Away
A couple weekends ago, I decided to have a little holiday. It started late on the Thursday night, with me heading downtown to catch UK DJ Dave Seaman spinning some tunes at The Plaza nightclub. It was a good evening, although rather short. Dave did his stuff, then packed up and buggered off home right at 2am, even though the crowd was pleading for just one more encore track. The crowd was also a lot more glamorous than the usual psychadelic hippie and feral bunch I've seen at the various Organix nights in Vancouver - lots of buff guys and slinky girls gyrating on the dancefloor, looking cool in their designer jeans. It was almost enough to make me think about becoming a stockbroker or a real estate salesman. Almost.
The next day, I went to Utah. This sounds like a strange place for me to go for a weekend away, but Salt Lake City has some excellent snow mountains, plus a good friend of mine, Cam, was working at one of them. He picked me up from the airport with his girlfriend, Clair, and immediately gave me a tour of the town. From my time there, I can say that it's flat, spacious, clean and quite strange. It feels like everyone in the place is holding their breath, or inside praying nice and hard. That isn't to say it's like a church college though - we saw several homeless guys, a biker bar and even a couple of porno stores, but there seemed to be an unsettling fog of quiet blanketing everything, which was a little bit weird.
Most of my time there was spent snowboarding at Snowbird, an excellent snow resort only 29 miles from SLC airport. Having the resort so close by means that Cam and Clair can live in the city and commute each day, avoiding the ridiculously expensive or horribly shoddy living conditions usually afforded to staff at such places. My boading continues to improve, although I still fall down a lot, and my legs get tired way too quickly. Personally, I blame my socks. I did manage to do some black (difficult) runs though, which was quite gratifying, although most of the time it wasn't pretty. It was also the first time that I've boarded two days in a row as well, which is pretty cool. I guess I'm getting better, or hurting myself less.
As well as the boarding, we had an excellent sushi dinner, a home-cooked fish feast, and a gut-bustingly delicious buffet lunch at the hotel on the mountain. I got to spend a bunch of time with my good buddy Cam, check out a new city, and meet lots of cute single women from lots of different countries. It was a great weekend away, and it proves that my plan to jet around North America for weekends might just work. There should also be a picture gallery of the weekend sometime soon, but they're still on Cam's camera. Hopefully he'll pass them on soon, and not accidentally mix them up with Clair's glamour shots.