the time has come

the walrus said, to talk of many things. things like…HOME! i’m going home in just two short days. i can’t believe it, this trip has gone by so fast and i’ve had so much fun. it’s been really nice to just be in one place for longer than a week and to let myself settle in somewhere, even if it is 12,000 miles from home. the last week of riding has been really fun, working hard on learning cab spins and playing around on the rails. tonight we celebrated jamie’s 19th at  missy’s kitchen in wanaka, happy birthday jamie! i love that place, great food, but one really crappy waiter who i keep on getting, which sort of makes the experience a bit unfortunate.

tomorrow is my last day of riding and then hopefully i’ll spend the evening at rippon vineyard or in qt going to ferg burger and inglorious bastards. either way would be a great way to end an almost perfect trip. here’s a few photos from the last few weeks. i wish i had some of the lambs that are finally here! i’m going to go hunt them down tomorrow, i need to see a lamby before i go.

talk soon,

s.

this is

the most beautiful thing i’ve seen in a long time. thanks to blake for posting it. i hope you all enjoy it as much as i did and i wish you could have seen the smile it brought to my face.

remember quiet nights.

let yourself feel.

sometimes i forget how important the little things are. sometimes i miss letting myself feel everything.

talk soon,

s.

it’s strange

to feel completely at home half way around the world. i guess having anthony here with me helps, as does having a daily routine to follow, but it’s just interesting because there’s very few places that i feel this comfortable. i’ve been in new zealand for nearly a month now and have changed my ticket to stay here for two more weeks before heading back to vancouver. unfortunately for me it’s been raining and really horrible weather for the last week now and it doesn’t show any signs of slowly down. i hope it chills out so we can actually go up the mountain because this town is pretty boring when you can’t go snowboarding or go outside. i think i’m going to go bake seeing as i don’t have anything else to do.

i don’t know what else to say…i’m bored and i want to go snowboarding!

talk soon,

s.

moonshiner-cat power

oh and listen to neverending math equation-sun kil moon (awesome cover)

photos

from the last few weeks in nz. pretty standard.

 

hopefully life will get more interesting in the next two weeks…

talk soon,

s.

new zealand

will be my new home for the next three weeks. i arrived a week ago after a month spent in whistler and vancouver. it was hard to leave the beautiful weather in vancouver, but it was worth the swap to get in some solid riding time. yesterday was the first day of practice for the Burton NZ Open and the course is looking really good. Today was totally crap weather so I decided to chill out rather than wandering aimlessly through the fog and rain up on the mountain in hopes of getting a few practice runs. Tomorrow is another day of practice and then it’s go time on Friday with semis and finals going down. The women’s slope field is extra stacked this year with the likes of Janna Meyen-Weatherby, Sarka Pancochova, Jamie Anderson, Hana Beaman and Jenny Jones to name a few so it should be a really good show. You can follow the live feed at www.go211.com, and hopefully i’ll be in there with the rest of the talented ladies. Wish me luck!

Oh and if you’re in wanaka at the moment, Burton is premiering their new movie “The B” tonight at the Wanaka Center so come and check it out.

Talk soon,

S.

 

tapped

in. here’s a good trailer for an even better looking documentary. we’re all so oblivious and every time i get a wake up call like this one, it blows my mind. i try to use a sigg bottle as much as possible, i have a filter a home, i recycle, but i still buy bottled water all the time.i guess every bit makes a difference, even though there’s a pile of it in the middle of the ocean the size of texas. makes my individual efforts seem pointless…

everyone just needs to get a bit more informed, myself included.

road tripping

through europe was a really good decision. been on the road for exactly two weeks, starting in france and travelling down through italy and heading to croatia today. we ended up staying in seignosse at darina’s place for a lot longer than expected, but it was really a lot of fun. a few amazing beach days that resulted in really funny burn lines. i could barely walk for two days because i burnt the backs of my legs so badly. i now have a stripe up one leg and random finger print lines up my right side…i look retarded. this is why i never tan, pasty just suits me better.

after darina’s be started the long drive to italy, stopping in the small town of avignon to break up the drive. we went to cinque terre, a collection of 5 tiny fishing villages on the coast of italy and then continued on to rainy florence. way too many tourists in that place, but i got to see the duomo, david and go to the uffizi which was really cool. we spent a few days in tuscany (my new favorite place) doing wine tastings and cruising through siena. it’s one of the most beauitful and relaxing places i have ever been, plus the wine is awesome. we bought a few bottles at one of the vineyards we stopped at and almost ended up dropping 200 euros to stay the night there. it probably would have been worth it, but oh well.

we’re now in rome, but are super over the tourist thing so we’re catching the ferry from bari tonight to croatia. at least i got to see the colloseum, roman forum, trevi fountain and an italian man beat up his wife with a metal belt buckle in the middle of the day. i had enough of rome once i saw that. it was the most brutal and awful thing i’ve ever witnessed and i think the worst part was that grown italian men just stood there and watched it like it was normal. we were all loaded into the van to go back to our campsite when it happened and one of the guys got out pretty quickly when he realized no one was stopping him, but it was too late. the guy ran off and the woman ran to us crying and screaming, bleeding from her head. ben, the guy from our campsite, took off his shirt to help stop the bleeding and still not a single person who could speak her language, take her to the hospital or call for help did. not even our driver would help her, he just yelled at her to get out of the van. i can’t ever imagine that happening in canada,that someone could even get away with doing that in a public place without numerous people trying to stop the man and help the woman. it was really sad and i hope that if it was her husband she leaves him because  a man like that doesn’t even deserve the love of his own mother.

sorry for the downer there, it’s just something i haven’t been able to stop thinking about. we’re going to start the drive to bari now. i’ll update sometime…maybe.

talk soon,

s.

man in the mirror-micheal jackson
i lost my phone in ny so we have no music but three cds that we bought, mj’s been getting us through some long ass drives.

unpacking

 

 

my bags for probably the 5oth time this season. i’m a bit of hypocrite when it comes to traveling because now that my season is finally done, i’m taking off to europe for six weeks. no snowboard bag, no computer, no cell phone. i can’t wait. that’s in eleven days so until then i’ll be hanging out in vancouver for the next week and then taking off to nyc for jake’s roundtables. going to chill in long island and talk about product, party, golf and eat lots of awesome food, it should be a good time.

i spent the last week at northstar at tahoe. it rained for the majority of the trip, but we got three solid days of sunshine and i’m now not completely translucent. the set up was insane, probably the most unique and creative feature i have ever hit. it was really awesome being able to ride with all of the guys and to be invited to a photoshoot that wasn’t just the women’s team. i hope we get the chance to do that again because it made me really stoked and i actually sort of wish i was still riding. kazu is my new favorite snowboarder too, he sleeps all day and then kills it for 2 hours and then goes back to sleep, so amazing. i don’t think i’ve ever been that stoked watching someone hit a hip before. overall everyone killed it and had a really good time, we even managed to to get in a game of hide and seek, which isn’t as easy as when you were six, trust me.

i’m going to go to the library now and hopefully start to get my euro trip dialed…we’re a total shit show at the moment and have no idea what we’re doing yet, but i think that’ll make it even more fun.

talk soon,

s.

memorize the city-the organ (i wish these guys still made music)

ps. the photo comes courtesy of sani, but he doesn’t know that i stole it. check out his blog.. http://sanistravelogue.blogspot.com/

i have been

partying…a little too much.

but i finally found the honey burbon that is oh so delicious. i might have to take a few bottles of that home with me.

europe in a couple of weeks for five weeks with the most important person, i can hardly wait.

talk soon,

s.

don’t get too drunk to fuck-avenue d.
(this one is for you nat, i miss you betch!)

i am officially

blowing it when it comes to blog updates. sorry guys. had a crazy week up in whistler with some solid party nights, but called it quits early in the week and headed back to vancouver for a bit of r&r. anthony and i were back and fourth, back and fourth a lot and on one of our trips down to van a drunk driver swerved across two lanes of traffic and right in front of me. i slammed on the brakes, but it was too late. i tboned him going 80kms and i honestly thought we were going to die. luckily everyone was ok and the cops arrived shortly after the accident. the dude was wasted from what i could collect from the sort of answers icbc and the cops gave me so it’s 100% his fault, but my car got wrote off and i’ve spent the last few weeks dealing with that. icbc finally gave me a reasonable amount of moola for my poor car, so yesterday i went down to the mazda dealership and bought another one. i was really hoping to avoid the whole car buying experience for longer than 10 months, but oh well, at least this time i knew exactly what i wanted. unfortunately though during the dealings with icbc i found out that i had an outstanding prohibition on my license from two and a half years ago so i had to surrender my license for two months and redo the N stage of my license. SO LAME! two speeding tickets in 5 years and i lose my license? stupid. oh and i also get a $130 licensing fee for them putting my license in a filing cabinet for two months. idiots.

oh well, i’m in tahoe now for a burton shoot and then i go to mammoth for men’s superpark and then i’m home for a week and then i go to europe for 5 weeks so i won’t even miss the little guy! when i get home i’ll be able to drive my new car and start my N phase over again…yay, two more years! ok i’m going to stop being so bitter now.

anyways, i just got into tahoe a few hours ago and if the weather clears up i think the shoots going to be really fun. like everything with burton right now it’s “top secret” so i can’t disclose any details just yet, even though i barely know what’s going to be happening for the next week. should be good times though, nearly the entire team is here, which i don’t think ever happens. i’ll try and post more now that i have access to internet. song of the day is below. an oldie, but a goodie.

holly going lightly-destroyer

talk soon,

s.