Walk On Your Life

Posts Tagged ‘Winter’

Upstate New York is a beautiful winter wonderland and with the winter months lasting a good five months, Upstate New York can be every snowboarders dream. There are a lot of slopes to hit at many different mountain resorts including Windham Mountain and Hunter Mountain Ski Resorts, located in the heart of the Catskill Mountains. Both resorts are equipped with state of the art snow making machines but get most of their snow base naturally. These snow making machines offer a nice powder snow cover, perfect for snowboarders and skiers alike.

If you are planning on taking a snowboarding trip in the Catskills, you need to make sure you choose the right type of snowboard for the right mountain terrain. A lot of younger boarders love to do tricks and free-style snowboard sweet moguls and both Windham Mountain and Hunter Mountain ski resorts offer courses for the free-style snowboarders. Hunter and Windham mountain resorts even offer snowboarding lessons and also hold exciting free-style competitions. If you plan on entering a competition you will definitely need to properly customize your snowboard. Look into what free-style boards and accessories will accentuate your skills and snowboarding style at your local board shop or even online.

The importance of choosing quality snowboarding equipment over choosing to purchase quantity snowboarding equipment can mean the difference between winning a competition and losing it. If you want to hit that sick jump and launch a sweet trick, you need to know that your board isn’t going to fail you on those crucial landings. Take the time to research different options and learn appropriate techniques for your boarding style.

The Winter Park Scenic Boat Tour, founded in 1938 and located just 15 minutes north of downtown Orlando, is one of these lovely side trips that combine beautiful scenery, a bit of local history, some close-up exposure to local wildlife and vegetation with a relaxing outing in a slow-moving 18-passenger pontoon boat, all complete with expert (and sometimes humorous) narration provided by the boat’s captain.

The tour takes you through 3 lakes: Lake Osceola, Lage Virginia and Lake Maitland. On this gorgeous day, with brilliantly blue skies, the boat whisked us past hundreds of beautiful water-front estates, many of which were originally built in the 1920s and originally sold for $20,000, while fetching between $500,000 and several million in today’s booming Central Florida real estate market. Even boathouses are worth between $30,000 and $40,000.

In Lake Virginia we came up close to the grounds of Rollins College, one of the top rated private liberal arts colleges in the South Eastern United States, founded in 1885 by New England Congregationalists. Rollins College is the oldest recognized college in the state of Florida with a small student body of 1,700 students, housed on a beautiful 70 acre Mediterraean Revival Campus. Our expert captain / tour guide mentioned that tuition at the college is $38,000 and the ratio of students to professors is 12:1.