Come On, Spring, Hurry Up!

Just my typical day off stroll to town along Lake Wanaka. Ho-hum.

The ebb and flow of my days here in Wanaka as a ski instructor at Cardrona differs in ways big and small from home in Vermont. Principal among those is how we get to work and the logistics involved. Staff vans pick up everyone at selected locations in town, swing by the town office in Wanaka for a head count, and then we make the forty minute drive to Cardrona - twenty minutes from town to the bottom of the crazy, windy, mountainous, unpaved access road and another twenty minutes from there to the resort. All in, from the time I walk out of my house in the morning at 7:00AM it takes about an hour. The folks here find it amazing that at home in Ludlow, I could roll out of my house and be at my old job at Okemo in five or ten minutes, with the largest chunk of that time spent waiting for my engine block to heat up on cold winter days.

One upside of the logistics of getting to work here is that I do get a few minutes of downtime each morning, looking out at Lake Wanaka and the Southern Alps and observing the change in seasons. Wanaka is far enough south that at this time of year we see daily reminders that spring is on its way. Some of the signs are funny. Are the street lamps still on when we are leaving town? Are they still on when we're at the pickup spot? Do we need sunglasses when we get to work? On the road? In town?! Over the past week, there has been a significant increase in the noise from the birds in the trees around our house in the morning, in the amount of traffic on the roads, and in the number of people exercising off their winter insulation as I leave my house. In late August and September here on the South Island, we add something like three minutes of daylight every day, and we feel it! Like Spring everywhere, all of the changes come with a great sense of relief and release. Winter may 'set in' but 'spring has sprung', for crying out loud.

I head home from New Zealand next week to start my new role as the director of the Sugarbush Ski & Ride School. I'm very much looking forward to my first September in New England in a long time and I'm anxious to get cracking. In the meantime, I'll make use of all of the spring and all of the daylight I can get.