Australia Day Norway Style

Australia Day has been and gone. Festivities have been had all over the country in the traditional sense: Beer, Australian Music and Barbeques. I might be in the icy tundra of south-central Norway, but I wasn't going to let that stop me.

Me and the Butcher brothers, Duane and Clinton, make up the Australian trio working at Geilolia Ski School. Preparations started on Friday afternoon as we started shoveling snow from Clinton's roof onto his front porch. The initial plan was to make an igloo to house the party guests and set up a barbeque out the front. Still being reasonably unfamiliar with snow shenanigans - my enthusiasm got the better of me and what should have been 5 minutes of snow shoveling turned into about 3 hours. After building up the snow mountain with snow from the roof we hurled ourselves into the powdery field below to start hollowing out the cave. We needed to be careful about it as the unstable structure had the potential to collapse at any moment. Between digging I kept looking at the holes we'd made jumping off the roof- these formed the beginnings of our ice bar.

Geilo has received insane amounts of snow the past weeks and last week was no exception. We had a lot of snow to work with which gave us a lot of potential and a lot of potential shoveling. But it was all worth it in the end. The pictures I took don't do the whole set up justice and in all the excitement we can only hope to build it up further over the season. Right now the cave can only handle 4-5 people at a squeeze but we plan to fix that with time.

As the Barbeque began to sink slowly into the snow over the course of the night so too did people sink indoors out of the cold. We ended up having just over 20 people at the party and a good 15 of them made it out on our party bus to off piste. The Spark VM was on the same weekend so there was actually a pretty decent sized crowd out. A big night of drinking and dancing ensued. One of the best I've had since New Years Eve.

Good onya Aussie.