Our Snowy Mountains holiday

Late post.

Recapping our Snowy mountains adventure last month.

The Pink Yeti

24 August (Sun)

I started my day by performing in the worship service. There's no greater feeling than fulfilling your duties to God before doing anything else. Finished at around 9:30am and headed home to get changed for the trip. Everyone was ready, including the kids.

Denmark and family arrived around 10:30am in their rented 8-seater Toyota Tarago. Their car is only 5-seater and there were 7 of them. After a short prayer, we started our 5-hour, 450km journey to the Snowy Mountains.

A little past 12 noon, we stopped at a BP station on the Hume Highway for a 15-min toilet break and some snacks. And again at another station somewhere between Canberra and Cooma at around 2pm for toilet breaks. We reached the Bluebox at just around 4pm. The trip was fantastic. No traffic whatsoever, the sun was up, the views were lovely, and it was a great bonding experience with the kids.

Family bonding on a long drive

The house we rented was also very lovely. It had 4 rooms that are well-presented. A spacious open-plan kitchen and lounge, and play area in the balcony with billiards and darts. There were also a bunch of boardgames to keep everyone buys.

As expected, the first thing we did as soon as we got there was eat. Lots of cooking, lots of eating. It was also starting to get dark so there wasn't any point going out anymore.

The only real problem I had with the place was there's no Optus coverage. Which meant we didn't have phone and internet access. I was actually excited with the thought because I haven't been "offline" for at least 5 years. But Lani insisted she needed internet because she was going to watch a Pinoy Big Brother elmination that night. So I had to buy a Telstra sim from the nearby petrol station and hook everyone up on the pocketwifi.

We spent the night watching TV, playing billiards, watching Erin and Keiko roam around the house, and yelling at Ethan and Ayane to be quiet (they're too noisy when they play). Denmark and family slept quite late playing Monopoly. Oh and the kitchen was always busy, of course. We had Irene, ka Nelly, Mama, and Papa always cooking or preparing something.

25 August (Mon)

Lani, myself and the 2 kids rose up early at 8am to find that everyone else are already prepared for our trip to the snow. So we had to hurry and changed to our snow gears. At around 9am we were headed out to the Selwyn Snowfields which was just 45mins away. We had to rent tire chains from the petrol station ($25/pair) which thankfully we didn't have to use.

Snow-capped mountains

The trip to the snowfields was great. We were anticipating the snow and it was really awesome when we started seeing snow-capped mountains from afar. Then going up a slope, we were greated by a cloud of fog that left less than 10-meter road visibility. It was fantastic. I think it was Ethan's favorite moment because whenever someone asks him about the trip, he'd say "we drove into the clouds."

After passing that long stretch of cloud-filled highway, we started seeing snow on the road side. It was really exciting. We reached the Selwyn Snowfields park not long after and we were thrilled to see glistening, bright snow covering the entire place.

Selwyn Snowfields was fun. It was a small cluster of snowy hills with a small slope for tubogan, another for snow tubing and a number of others for skiing. We didn't try skiing coz we were contented with just playing on the snow. We did some tubogan in the afternoon which was really fun but very tiring, because you'd have to walk up the snowy hill which was really difficult.

We brought some food to eat but there was also a cafe that served hot food.

We left at around 3:30pm when it started drizzling (with little bits of snow) and it was getting too cold for the kids. At night, it was again TV and food galore.

26 August (Tue)

After a heavy breakfast, we left the house at around 10am to travel back home. We stopped by the Mount Ainslie Lookout for a view of Canberra and our lunch. Then went on our journey home with a stop at McDonalds and petrol.