There's nothing like cross-country skiing, fresh air, snow, and a good workout. Now x-country skiing is great at anytime but at night it's even better. The temperature was ideal (-7 to -8 degrees Celsius), great snow (dry and powdery), wax was perfect and finally the moon is almost full. All these things factored in make it indescribable. You almost fly across the snow and you can do 8 feet just on one kick. It's the closest thing to flying I know with your two feet still on the ground. Add to that, the full moon and it's "féerique"
(more beautiful than reality, from the fairies world) The moon shining on the snow is so bright that most of the time I had my head light turned off. The pale white light, sparkling on the snow, with the black, black shadows of the trees makes an image approaching the abstract. When you stop all you can hear is the soft sighing of the breeze in the trees, nothing else. No cars, no people talking, nothing. If ever you get a chance to try I highly recommend it.
Sunset on the lake
I've spent the Christmas holidays doing not much of anything, except doing a lot of reading and watching some good old fashioned murder mysteries with Mrs. BB. Since we have had a vast amount of snow since the beginning of December, I did get in a lot of cross country skiing at Cap St-Jacques near my place and did 25 km on Friday in Gatineau Park. The conditions were superb, cold enough to be comfortable and have good snow conditions but warm enough to not freeze when you stopped. Having not much to do and plenty of time to do it in, I took some of the pictures I took and turned them into a 360 degree panorama as a QuickTime VR. Here is what the trail and Lac Pink looked like (You'll need the QuickTime plugin. They are 360 degree panoramas. All you have to do is click on them, holding down your mouse button and move the mouse in the direction you want to go.) The The scenery was beautiful even if the cloud cover made it very grey.
