In late January I went to Washington to meet up with the development team there. To make good use of the time, Simon invited me to come along snowboarding in West Virginia. As I didn't have any gear I decided to buy my very first snowboard. We were about 10 adults and 5 children in a beautiful, not so little mountain cottage. We cooked our own food every day and enjoyed snowboarding from Wednesday to Sunday.
Then I had a week of work at the Reston office. While I was in the States my flatmates got called up by our estate agents who said we had 2 weeks to move house as the landlords didn't want to renew our contract. Fortunately they found somewhere just around the corner. So I got back to London at 7am on Saturday morning, and came straight home from the airport to find most of my belongings already packed into boxes. I kept packing what was left and once we had a van for moving our stuff, we started packing up the van. For the next two days we kept moving stuff and we finally finished on Sunday night.
Just a week later Kate and I flew to Germany to go cross-country skiing with my parents and sister in the Czech Republic. The weather wasn't too great. The temperatures started rising above freezing point and rain was predicted. We were afraid we would not have any snow to ski on but it all turned out to be very beautiful.
I did promise Kate that she would get a snowman for Valentine's day, so when we were taking a break from skiing I built a big snowman right next to the track. I spent about an hour decorating him and turning him into a punk snowman.
The hotel we stayed in was barely tolerable. The food was just plain awful and the staff was plain rude. But that didn't stop us exploring the area and find some other restaurants where we could enjoy beatiful Czech food. We had a few nice days where it was just sunny with fresh snow that came down overnight. All in all, we were very lucky.