After the last few weeks of working in the city, we decided to treat ourselves this weekend with a little trip to the snow at Mount Buller, a few hours into the highlands of Victoria, and after picking Jamie up at 6:00am yesterday morning, we were on our way.

We made our way through several little towns, passed the farming lands and hillsides as the sun came up and everything was going well until a couple of hours into the drive when we came to a bridge. Now normally we would have been across it just like any other bridge, only there was a fog so thick that we couldn't see anything out to either side and no further than a metre or two in front of the car. It was pretty bizarre crawling along the bridge as although we all knew the road continued on the other side, there was still a sense that the bridge might suddenly stop and we wouldn't be able to do anything about it!

Once we got to Mansfield, we got ourselves checked into our digs and then it was time for some serious matters. Breakfast! A bacon and egg muffin later and we were all ready to hit the slopes, with only the small issue of hiring the necessary equipment standing before us. This was soon taken care of as nearly every shop in the town was a rental place (even the petrol stations hired out ski gear) and we were back in the care heading towards the base of the slopes.

The road up was a typical mountain road which wound its way around the mountain never seeming to get any closer, but it did have one sign in particular that caught our attention as it read "Caution, Elves!". None of us had any idea what it was talking about until we rounded the next corner and saw an elf house in a tree on the side of the road, complete with letter box!

By the time we got to the car park on the mountain we were all itching to get on the snow and after a short bus ride to the village we had our opportunity - all we had to do now was master the chairlifts that had caused so many problems in New Zealand. Luckily these lifts didn't appear to be moving as fast and after a successful dismount by all parties we were sitting at the top of the slope, ready to go - something that we had been looking forward to doing ever since we got our own snowboards in Brisbane, some eight months earlier.

Needless to say we were all a bit patchy as it had been a couple of years since any of us had done it, resulting in a few tumbles here and there but after a couple of runs we were getting back into the swing of things and managing to link our turns once again. We spent the majority of the day on the beginners' slopes as we tried to remember everything from our lessons in New Zealand and by the time the lifts shut down we were fairly sure that we would be able to progress to the more difficult slopes on Sunday. We finished the day feeling very pleased with ourselves and headed back to Mansfield for the night a little cold and a little sore, but still in one piece.

When we were back at the motel there was only one thing on our minds - the pub - and just up the road there was a welcoming log fire, a cold beer and some hot food that had our names on it. Knowing we had another big day ahead of us we restricted ourselves to just a couple of drinks and then headed back to our room, where the heated blankets were greeted with much joy!

Yesterday we got ourselves back up the mountain as early as we could muster and were soon back on the snow ready for another full day of snowboarding. We had one last run down the beginners slope to reassess the conditions and make sure that we could still remember what we were supposed to be doing, and then we headed up onto some of the more difficult runs.

The first thing that struck us was that it was pretty difficult to work out where to go to get to each run as the signposts were very few and far between and we found ourselves having to un-strap our boards and walk on a number of occasions when we found we needed to go up the slope! The other problem we had was that all the black runs (the hardest ones) were closed off so all the people that were really good were flying past us while we tried to learn our way around the courses. The other issue with the runs being closed is that the edge of the runs was just a steep drop into oblivion as there was no snow where it should be and we often came around a corner to find there was a bright orange net to stop us from plummeting onto the rocks below.

We managed to avoid any serious incidents and after a while we were confident enough on the new runs to be able to enjoy ourselves and the snow was better on these slopes in the morning than the easier runs. However, by the afternoon the snow was wearing very thin and towards the end of the day we often found that we were skipping over rocks, which we could hear scraping against our lovely new boards! By the end of the day our favourite run was reduced to a few strips of powder along the edges and a long run of rock and ice down the main thoroughfare. The end of the run towards the chair lift was very narrow with a big drop off to the left and for some reason we were having a bit of trouble turning away from the edge so David came up with an ingenious idea of steering into the powder banked up on the right at a fair pace so that he could make patterns when he crashed into it! At least it stopped him from flying off the run!?

Before we knew it, the weekend was coming to an end and we had to head down the slopes for the final time and get ourselves back in the car and on our way back to Melbourne. Tomorrow we are going to meet Jamie and Laura for a drink before they leave for the UK for five weeks, but for now it is time to warm up our cold bones!