Katie's Adventures: A 'Fully Sick' Easter!

"Fully Sick" means good. It's Aussie for wicked, cool, awesome. That's what this weekend was.

As I said before, Easter is sort of a big deal over here, Good friday AND Easter Monday were public holidays, so I joined Jen and 3 of her friends down in Thredbo for the weekend. Thredbo is a ski resort town that is taken over by montain bikers in the summertime. This is the traditional last weekend before winter hits, the last chance to enjoy the biking and hiking. It was pretty darn cold... its being autumn and up in the mountains... thank goodness Jen has doubles of all her cold weather stuff - I didn't bring too much with me. I guess I thought it was aways summer down here! I fact, if I were to keep up my streak I'd have to move BACK to the States right about now to be in spring/summer for a year and a half. Sounds sort of tempting, I must say.

Tangent... I've really been mising Atlanta today. I just wanted to be in my own truck, on my roads, with my old job, driving back to my own house, to my cat, to dinner with MY friends. I miss my people. Definitely a wave of homesickness. Probably beause I finished my taxes today and it just reminded me of all the stuff I left at home. Well, the house, mainly. You've heard of all those great tax-benefits you get for buying a house? Well, move to another country and have 3 months income from elsewhere and you can pretty much kiss those benefits all goodbye. Not completely, but still! Oh well. I'm happy to be here (most days) and I'm not coming back anytime soon. But I do miss the ATL VERY MUCH sometimes. Especially the people.

Okay...

Back to Thredbo... we got down there on Friday aternoon and went out for a ride, a cross-country track - my first time off the pavement (or bitumen, as they say here) with my bike. It was pretty damn cool. Not too steep and we were in some gorgeous country-side. (I've put the pictures up on Flickr - click on the Flickr picture pane in the right-hand nav-pane.) Here's me going through some water.

This was towards the end of the ride and I had FROZEN toes by the time we got back to our cabin. It wasn't really a cabin as much as it was an apartment out of an IKEA catalog - dark browns, creams, and reds, modern, white. Very swanky. Sort of an odd environment to 'escape to the mountains' in, but hey - I'm not arguing with a flat-screen TV in EVERY single room. hehe.

On Saturday the 4 of us, me, Jen, Rob, and Andy (the 'fully sick' guy) signed up to do a downhill initiation course. Yeah. Cause downhill even sounds like something I want to do to myself. But, I was in Thredbo to give it a go, so I signed up. Rob and Andy were totally stoked, testosterone definitely helps in this arena. In fact, when Jen and I were signing up for the course (there were about 30 people doing the course, 5 girls), at one point we were the only 2 girls in this small cabin where registration was and where people were getting fitted with full body armour (yes, you read that correctly, full body armour). There were about 15 guys in there, all very stoked and hyped up. Not that I'm complaining! But you could practically taste the testosterone. You could defintiley smell it. But, like I said, I'm not really complaining. There are some hotties that do the whole mountain biking thing. Especially the instructors! Maybe it's something to do with the fact that you have to really concentrate on everything they say, because it's important to the learning experience, and, oh yeah, SURVIVING as you are hurtling down a mountain on a bike, but it helps that they are good looking. Much easier to concentrate. Yeah right. :)

Anyway, I was definitely apprehensive going into this day - I'm not much of a downhill skier, I'm much more interested in cross-country. Downhill has too much speed involved. Note to self - listen to one's apprehensions! Anyway, we did some basic skills at the foot of the mountain, said we were ready, and climbed on the chairlift for the 14 minute ride up to the top. We get off the chairlift, listen to Will, our instructor, give us some last minute advice, and we're off. Onto a fire road that was seriously a 90% grade (ok. maybe it was only 10%. whatever). It was covered in gravel and I immediatley was in over my head. I stopped and walked my bike down the hill to the first meeting point. Not really a good start. As the group of us are waiting for others to make it own (I actually wasn't the last down, I was 3rd to last!) there are TONS of other bikers that go roaring past. So damn fast. And on the same track I'm about to crawl my way down. Nothing like a little motivation from behind to push you along. I didn't want to be in the way when one of them came down the track.

So, we set off on the next set.. and I'm again immediatlye walking. Good god. Way too steep, too many rocks, too narrow - I could go on and on. Truth is, I was seriously in over my head. I don't know that I'd even attempt to walk down this track, let alone strap into a bike and hurtle down. No way. When we got to the 2nd stop, one of the other girls gave up (having stacked twice (stack=crash)) and asked for a ride down off the mountain. As we were waiting for the car to get there, Will started to explain the next section. Bad idea WIll. That's the way to completely freak me out. I was good until he said it was way more steep than the section we just did and that at the end was a left hand turn with a steep drop-off, so we'd have to really be in control of what we were doing. Yeah. That was it. I swallowed my pride, my rising tears, and asked Will if there was room in the car for me too.

Yep. I bailed out. I was pretty hard on myself for the next few hours afterwards, but I'm now okay with it. There's just no way that was on okay situation for me, and I knew I'd reached my limit. I pushed my limits a bit, but knew I couldn't go anymore. I still felt sort of crappy for the rest of the day - I mean we're in a mountain biking town, having drinks with other moutnain bikers, and my story involves the words 'I bailed out'. Especially when Jen came back and had successfully gotten down the course, with a pretty spectacular stack that gave her a good war wound - a beautifully bruised knee. Now there's a story to tell the cute guys over a few beers! Oh well. I did okay... somehow I managed to find stuff to talk to the cute guys about. It all works out in the end, doesn't it? :)

On Sunday we did a bike/hike up Mount Kosciuszko (pronounced Koz-i-osko), the tallest peak in Oz. It was an amazingly beautiful day, and despite being more than a little dehydrated from the previous evening (I was certainly not drinking enough water to compensate for the altitude, the activities, and, oh yeah, the drinking. Whoops.) the day was great. The views form the top of Mt. Kozzie are spectacular. On Monday we did a short little cross-coutry track around the Thredbo golf course before we headed back to Canberra. This wa my favorite ride of the weekend, although I forgot my camera, so no pics of the track. But it was the perfect combination of uphill (my favorite), downhill (stairs, rocks, roots, but not too steep so that I felt out of control) and flat. Part of it was by the Thredbo River, so it was just gorgeous. And all that fresh air. Amazing!

Some of my favorite pics... check out the Flickr album for more: