Yak & Natter

With Jane’s Nokia 6110 navigator, and the other GPS devices we have, we’re going to be accumulating KML files. We already have, in fact. We use them in Google Earth, but recently Google added the ability to show KML data in Google Maps. So here’s a couple of examples:

• locations of airports in the north-western USA (beta, do not use for navigation, all disclaimers apply)
• a day in Wolf Mountain

Dosa at Waves
Originally uploaded by Jane Dallaway

Many thanks to Andy for telling us about Waves in Hove. They are a Dosa Diner, and carry dosas as well as idli, pooris and other indian “street food”.

We headed out there this evening and gave them a try, and we’ll be back having had a most satisfying eat on dhai poori, masala dosa for me and a spring dosa for Richard. All washed down with a glass of red for Richard, and a couple of sweet lassis for me.

Further to my blog after our Performance course, I’ve since learnt about The Snowboard Show being held at the Tamworth snowdome in September. Amongst the demos and talks there are also some free coaching sessions, 2 of which are Freeride technique with the instructor from the Performance course, Ash Newnes. All you have to do to get on one of the sessions is to register by sending an email to the address at the bottom of this page. We’ve booked on to the Rail Technique session to see what we can learn.

In other news we’re looking at places to go for snowboarding over New Year. In recent years we’ve been to Avoriaz, Meribel and Utah. Ideally we want somewhere reasonably high up to make sure that there is some chance of snow, somewhere an hour or two from the airport, and most importantly somewhere that hasn’t got a minimum stay of less than 4 nights. Any suggestions? Or do you know of someone with an appartment to rent? Leave us a comment

We’ve also started planning our big trip for next year – a month long snowboarding adventure. At the moment it is looking like being based around Montana, Idaho and Portland, and making use of the Alaska Airlines schedule to get around, but all that could change. I’m hoping that the Off the Beaten Path USA trip report will offer some more insights as the guy who wrote that had some good suggestions for our Utah trip. Again, any suggestions? leave us a comment.

We spent the weekend taking the excellent SnowboardCoach.co.uk 2 day Performance Course at Xscape in Milton Keynes. We were a group of 8, and Ash managed to keep an eye on all of us giving feedback and advice – my main area to keep an eye on is not to use my upper body/shoulders to initiate turns. We did lots of drills, some designed to get us to understand the physics behind snowboarding, others to emphasise a point. An excellent course, which has really given me a desire to head off back to Milton Keynes soon and continue my practice.