1-day Work Week. Oh, and then the Womens' Downhill World Cup.

On Friday, although it's normally my day off, Shannon let me work in lieu of the days I'd taken off on the CSIA course.

On Saturday, I did something much more interesting! I took the bus to Banff, then caught a different one to Lake Louise. Saturday was the first day of the Lake Louise stop of the Womens' Downhill World Cup race tour, so I thought that might be worth watching.

Although I missed the first bus into Banff, I managed to catch one which allowed me enough time to transfer to one to Lake Louise ($15 return! Arghh!). I came to realise two things during that bus- 1, it must be a real pain to live in Banff and work in Lake Louise, since it's about 1 hour commute each way, and 2, it must be very very cold outside for the river at 0 degrees to be visibly steaming. Definately not a day to lose one of your mittens.


The arena and crowd (with me in the VIP area). One of the finishers once she'd found out she was 1st.

I hadn't brought any of my skiing gear with me to Lake Louise, and although I'd hoped to go up the gondola to take some pictures I happened to come along on the day when the gondola wasn't working. I sneaked pass security without even realising it, and found myself in the VIP seating area only for passholders, so I got a nice view and a personal heater. I had some lunch, a Subway I'd purchased earlier which had the interesting addition of frozen BBQ sauce.

By about 12:15, the first racers came down, mostly up-and-coming new skiers from Canada, and at 12:30 the race began. The skiers came down about 10 seconds after the previous one had 'landed', and we saw most of the action on the TV screens since we could only see the final stretch and the final jump. It was well commentated and the crowd was pretty enthusiastic- especially when someone took the lead or when a Canadian woman came down. You can imagine the reaction when Britt Janyk of Canada secured third place (I couldn't see her for all the flag waving)...



Views from the chairlift. The bottom one shoes the glacier above Lake Louise itself.



I waited around until #25, Chemy Alcot of GBR came down (she did very well considering she was the only skier from a country with no snow), then went in search of free stuff. Warmed up with hot cider, chocolate bar and some soup, and with a free stick of lip salve, I decided to go up a chair lift to take some photos. 20 minutes later and some mild frostnip later, I was back on the bus to Banff.

When I got back to Sunshine, I found that I'd lost one of my mittens...