Our first full day in the ski village, and we made the most of it.
Austin had come into our room at some point before 5am (daylight savings adjusted) and Damian was coughing, so I relented with the sleeping attempts and got up at around 5:30am to literally watch the sunrise. I’d turned off the heaters in the upstairs/loft/kitchen/living, and it took an hour and half to get it up to a reasonable level of comfort. I tried the fireplace, but it really only heated the enclosure itself. The embers made me feel warm, but not in practice. Damian joined me at around 6am and by 7:30am or so, I was back to bed as the others waked and had their breakfasts.
I surfaced at close to 10:30am a little groggy. I’d warned all concerned that it would be best to head the 10 mins down the road to Mt Hotham before it rained (later in the week) to get the benefit of what snow remained. After much persistence, I managed to get all and sundry into their winter/snow gear, bar Austin who only allowed us to kit him with his warm snow jacket and hat.
We made easy time to the resort, barren owing to the closure of the season on Sunday. There’s still plenty of snow though, even through most of it is inaccessible without the help of chair lifts or additional equipment. Not to worry, we split time between the toboggan area (snow play) and the main resort and back to the snow play area which seemed to satisfy everyone’s snow cravings.
The financial upside to visiting a day or so after the end of the season is the savings – no gear hire, snow chains or resort access fees. The kids got their taste of cold weather/snow and riding toboggans and we saved easily half a grand in the process. Sure, almost nothing is open, but there’s no crowds and the snow cover is fine for beginners.
We spent until 2:30pm and then came back to the village. We had lunch at the chalet and then walked back up to the main entrance. Toni peeled off for a towel folding activity at reception whilst I took the kids to the playground. We met some other kids there and kicked around until 4:30pm. We walked back via one of the many hiking trails and then went to work preparing for dinner. After the meal Toni and I took a walk around some of the southern trails before retiring back to the chalet.
I jumped onto the laptop and started writing up the past four days worth of activities…