Snowboating February 2009
From ICCC
People
With a guest mention of
Trip Report
Once upon a time, it was a cold and snowy Monday morning in Imperial College London.
"Humph," said Andy. "I'm bored. I wish I could go snow boating."
"Oooh, snow boating, yay!" chirped Rachel. "Let's go to the park!"
So Andy and Rachel met at stores, and, following an extraordinary and disproportionate amount of faff, they managed to leave stores by 10:30am. The walk over to the park took less time than expected, arriving at 10:35am.
The Albert Memorial's mound looked better than it turned out to be, and so, after a couple of runs each, we went to look for pastures steeper. And longer.
The path running through Kensington Palace Gardens has a surprising gradient to it, so we went here.
We built a nice 50cm kicker, and prepared for some Grade IV action. Andy made the first descent, and named the ramp "Spine Hater". Mind you, he couldn't fit his knees in the boat, so "Knee Hater" would be an alternative name.
Rachel just would not stop until she managed to put in a decent boof stroke over the Spine Hater.
Unfortunately, the kids out sledging also wanted to run the Spine Hater. What are they teaching kids in school these days? Clearly not how to sledge straight over a ramp. They kept destroying the edges. One quick piece of reverse psychology later, Andy convinced them to build a 'bigger and better' ramp.
After about an hour, we grew tired, and decided that we should maybe go and do some work.
Maybe.
On the way back to college, Andy decided to taunt a group of 8 school children because of their inability to pelt accurately one of their number with snowballs. It is perhaps worth mentioning that Andy was carrying the boat on the side nearest these kids, and was thus able to deflect the ensuing volley of snowballs. Rachel, on the other hand, had a paddle and two helmets.
(They were still unable to land more than one snowball on the hull of the kayak, so they must have been really bad aim).
After a quick stop off for chips in Llangollen, we made it back to College at the surprisingly early time of 11:45am.
Epilogue
It seems that Rik has also been out having some snow boating fun, on a staircase. It looked better than ours, with fewer kids in the way.
http://www.city.ac.uk/web/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/rik.jpg
Tsk, City boys. They will always try to AMOG you.
