Who Says Vacations Have to Be Lazy?

So this past weekend was part of the academic "winter break," but I certainly didn't laze around. Saturday morning Colin, Franzi, Franzi's two friends Gavriel and Joanna and I left for Chapelle for what was my second day of real cross-country skiing. The warm weather this past week has caused lots of the snow to melt at the ski stations near Besançon and there was talk of this being the last good weekend for snow. So Friday night we decided to take advantage of the opportunity and go! We got on the road a bit later than planned (nearly 10am) and some traffic jams in Pontarlier meant we didn't get to the ski rental place until nearly noon. Luckily Chapelle is small and so the time to rent skis, drive to the start of the trails, and get going was probably 15 minutes total. It was another gorgeous day! 50+ degrees and sunny, with a few clouds and not too much wind.

Unfortunately Gavriel didn't take to cross-country skiing (it was the first time for him, Joanna and Franzi) and after only a few minutes on the first run he decided he didn't want to continue. The rest of us did a short 4.5km loop, then met up with him for lunch. Franzi, Colin and I headed back out again after lunch and we ended up doing another 21km in less than 4 hours! By the end we were totally exhausted (we fell for the classic rookie skier mistake and picked the longer route each time we had a choice, then ran out of energy with another 5km to go).

I felt much more confident on my skis this time around and we tackled much more challenging trails with bigger descents and steeper climbs. Franzi was a champ; it was her first time cross-country skiing and she picked it up right away. I didn't fall once until late in the afternoon, then proceeded to take a major face-plant going down a hill (fatigue?) But overall it was a great success! I'm so glad we got to go again before the snow melted!

Then yesterday (Sunday) I had an all-day riding stage (clinic). This was my first all-day stage, I did a morning one back in the fall. This one was much better, although we had a few hiccups in the beginning (it took everyone a little while to get organized, so we weren't on the horses until after 10am, then the instructor's son fell off his bike while on his way to the barn and started screaming like he had broken his femur... it took Béa, the instructor, a little while to calm him down). But overall it was great! I got to ride 3 different horses: Luivafer, Quadrille, and Roxy. Quadrille is the horse/pony who is my usual mount. She's built like a large pony, but I'm positive she's technically too tall to be considered one. I had ridden Luivafer before and knew he was fun, although he was pretty wild at the beginning. We got to ride outside, which was a pleasant surprise!

The stage is basically four lessons, back-to-back, with a break after the second for lunch: mise-en-scène jumping (warm-up for jumping), jumping, lunch, mise-en-scène dressage, dressage. The idea is that you have four different mounts, one for each section, but I ended up riding Quadrille for jumping and mise-en-scène dressage. The ability level was more homogenous this time, which I think was part of the reason the stage was more pleasant. We were still quite numerous: 15 in the morning and 12 in the afternoon. The coolest part for me was that I got to jump a butte (bank) for the first time with Quadrille. I've never really done any eventing, and so jumping solid obstacles is intimidating for me anyway, let alone going down one! These pictures (photo credit to Wikipedia) will make it clearer:

Quadrille was great and handled both the ascent and descent like a pro (she's a recent addition to the barn and Béa had no idea if she'd ever done this before, which wasn't reassuring for me). Having the horse "fall" in front of me was a really strange sensation, but not entirely unpleasant and now I have a better understanding of how eventing could be a huge adrenaline rush.

The stage really did take all day, and I was quite sore at the end (we did posting trot without stirrups for what seemed like an eternity, and THEN did two-point with no stirrups, which should actually be classified as torture). I feel surprisingly good today, but let's face it, typing this blog entry isn't really stressing my legs. I hope all of you had equally-wonderful weekends!