The uneventful flight to Calgary last Thurdsday night was followed by a nail bitter ride in a rented mini-van through a moderate blizzard up to Banff with JF at the wheel (JF recently had his Focus lowered so he can take corners faster). The only way up to Sunshine (and the hotel) is via the gondola but when we arrived at 10:30pm on Thursday the gondola was no longer running and the tracked vehicle that was supposed to pick us up wasn't there to greet us. So instead we drove around on the front patio of the gondola till security came down to bust us. Security guy then spent an hour rustling up some snowmobilers to snow mobile us up to the hotel. The snow mobile ride in a blizzard up to the hotel at midnight was a definite highlight.

After two nights on the hill we moved down to Banff for a night at the Ptarmagin Inn.

The conditions all 3 days were great. There was lots of snow with fresh snow every day. The temperature was just right. Warm enough so that we weren't cold but not so warm that the snow melted.

The company was great. There was JF (who is a manager at Gords) and his girlfriend Leanne, Shawn and Kathy who are both cops, and Bob a cardiologist (who must be the same age as my dad). Dr.Bob turned out to be quite the skiier. He even brought a shovel and had plans of renting an avalance beacon thing so that he could ski Delirium Dive an out of bounds double black (both a shovel and beacon are required to ski Delerium). Unfortunately we let Bob down the first 2 days but on the third we ducked under the out of bounds line quite a few times but not to ski Delerium since the rest of us were lacking shovels.

Too much equipement? JF aka Team Gord's brought with him a whole ton of top of the line 2003 skiis which Shawn and Bob appreciated but I certainly didn't :).

On the way back I was planning on catching a midnight flight out of Calgary which ended up being delayed (because it was snowing too hard) and then we didn't arrive in Toronto till 8am. I wasn't expecting much company on the flight since my flight to Calgary was pretty sparse but the red eye was packed full of passengers. I then picked up John in Toronto and we suffered through two traffic jams on the 401.
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