Ski Weekend at Perisher

The past two ski seasons I skied Threadbo, so I was keen to ski Perisher which is the only other ski resort in the Sydney-area. Now that I've been to both, I definitely prefer Threadbo for its longer ski runs, ski village and night life.

Perisher had its charm though. Before I even arrived I knew that getting to Perisher was going to be half the adventure. It was like "planes, trains and automobiles". But at Perisher - it's more like "ski tube, on snow and Aeropelican".

To get to Perisher, we parked the car and piled all our luggage and ski gear on to a push cart that we took onto the ski tube which is a train that goes through a mountain tunnel right up to the ski slopes. Then we piled all our gear on to an "over snow" (not "over-the-snow", but "oversnow") which is like a massive army tank outfitted with ski and luggage racks on top and on the side. We took this "over snow" to our on mountain lodge - called the Sun Deck.



My friends Georgina, Paul, Tiffany and Kevin were staying an extra day so I took a flight back to Sydney on the Aeropelican. What an odd name for a regional airline - can pelican's even fly? I sat in seat A1 so had a "bird's eye" view of the pilots - what surprised me was there was no door between the passengers and the pilots - I could look right in and see all the controls, lights and buttons!

In an interesting side-note, when we say "banking holiday" we mean any official holiday when the banks are closed in the US. But in Australia, there is an actual holiday called "Banking Holiday" (Aug. 1) which was designed for bank employees in compensation for all the extra hours they worked. Paul works for a bank so he had a long weekend of skiing.



We were booked into the Sun Deck for two-nights and it included breakfast and dinner. Which was a good thing as the "ski village" was down the mountain and hard to get to and we later discovered didn't have much going on in terms of apres ski activities. So our daily routine became, wake up early as if we're going to get a fresh start before everyone else when the reality was we waited until the espresso machine came alive at 9:30 a.m., ski starting at around 10 a.m. then after skiing we hit the bar, rolled into dinner and then back into the bar.

Ice Skating on Bondi Beach

What will the Aussie's think of next - an ice skating rink right on Bondi Beach!

It was a gorgeous day (July 10), bright blue skies and waves coming right up to the ice skating rink. It was so warm out that the conditions on the ice skating rink weren't very good. So my friend Sandy and I skated a few times around the rink and then headed into the "ski chalet" for some refreshments.