Sledding. For Real this Time You've seen those crazy Olympic Bobsledders on TV, right? Remember the smaller, my-gawd-he-must-be-nuts event called Luge? It's the one where the guy lays down on this sled and steers with his feet while watching it all by looking over his chest? Keep that image in mind. I'll be adding to it.
Picture a ski slope, maybe green circle to easy blue square in steepness, about a mile long, and maybe 40 feet wide. A very steep, extra wide fire road that weaves it's way around the Oslo hills.
Now take that first picture of the luge, put me on it, and the put us on the ski trail. Now animate it. Not bad, eh? It took me half the run to notice how steering works: you lean left to turn right, lean right to turn left. It's the opposite of a bike, which is how spent the first half of the trip trying to steer. Now what does that animation in your head look like? Pretty good, eh? Now add the somewhat soft power snow drift on one side of the trail, and the steep drop off that lay on the other, and this has the makings for quite a comical adventure.
We had a blast. Sledding is one of the more exciting things I've done, its like skiing, but (for me) without the control, and with a much more intense sense of speed. I mean, you lying down 6 inches above the ground, getting to much closer usually means something bad happpened...
This sledding run in Oslo is even services by public transportation. That's how good Norway is. The light rail train stops at the bottom of the hill, ( it has more stops then these 2, it's a normal service route with some special stops. They didn't build a train just for the sledding hill....) and goes up to the top about a mile or so down the line.
Our particular day has some interesting traffic. The train didn't go all the way up the hill, so they train company had hired Maxi Taxis to haul us the rest of the way. It was a nightmare of delays and waiting. All in -10 degree weather. I think it took up an hour to get back to the top of the hill, after our 20 minute sledding ride, which was the major reason we didn't go anymore. An hour standing around in -10 is not fun. Neither is navigating a improvised mass transit device.
But what a one run it was. As I said, I had the steering wrong for half the trip, which kept thing interesting. Especially with my liking for speed. Lugeing goes something like this: sit down on the thing. Lift my feet, and hang on. When something gets in the way, turn. This usually resulted in some panic as my turning made the problem worse. About here my feet would go back down to get some control and bleed off some speed, and that would throw snow up in my face with enough vengeance to make my very own white out. So now I was heading for badness and blind. Ah.. what fun that was.
I didn't have any major misshapes, but the other two in our group did. Lars was heading down and managed to loose control, an especially easy thing to do, and realized peril was near when he saw a tree appear before him. He dove off the sled just before impact, leaving the sled to slam into the tree without him. The damage to sled was minor, these things are made for abuse, but the tree suffered some significant bark removal. Kristen had the opposite problem. She was sitting still. A guy behind her had some steering issues, and ran into her. She was OK, but man, she had a monster of a bruise the next day.
Ah. Winter Fun. Posted by byron at January 02, 2003 05:14 PM