What we discovered planning for our last trip to the Snowy Mountains and how you can plan your fully accessible holiday for next Winter!
Speeding down a mountain faster than everybody else, being able to access a part of nature you have been so desperately wanting to visit for years … oh yes, now you can say that all of the hard work and planning you did three months prior to your trip has definitely paid off.
As you may have already read in my skiing blog from last year ‘Exploring our Australian Winter while having fun just like everyone else!‘, iI absolutely love skiing as it has been my obsession since I was a little kid. I have amazing memories skiing down massive Black Runs with my late great friends Storm and Simon, too. Of course this last Winter wasn’t any different as Alison and I were excited to introduce Martha, Andrew, Sarah, Heather and Sara to the slopes at Perisher, Jindabyne, to the wonderful people at Disabled Wintersports Australia (DWA) and to my passion for Sit Skiing. I was so excited to help make this trip happen as it was both Martha’s and Sarah’s first time Sit Skiing.
The planning for our trip started a few months earlier just like it always does. Over all of the years that I have been going on this trip, one thing I’ve learnt is to make sure to book your accommodation first. Although there’s plenty of accessible accommodation around Jindabyne itself, including at The Siesta Villa Resort and The Equestrian Centre, the accommodation that we chose to stay at was The Station Resort. The main reasons we chose to stay at
The Station Resort for this time around were because we knew that it definitely had multiple accessible rooms to fit the needs of our group, and it also had facilities such as several bars, restaurants and entertainment areas right on site which became quite handy, especially when we discovered that Pete Murray was performing there on one of the nights.
After confirming all of our accommodation our next step was to get in contact with Disabled Wintersports Australia (DWA) and become a member for 2018. The individual DWA membership fee is only $109 per year and provides you with an ID card allowing you access to free lift passes, adaptive equipment hire and access to amazing volunteers who are the most incredible skiers. After receiving confirmation of our membership, our next step was to book in all of our equipment and sessions with our volunteers. We all did this via a very simple process through our DWA membership portals. All we had to do was to simply complete two booking forms, which contained specifics for our sit skis like our weight and height and also the times that we preferred to go skiing.
After we got these steps and some carer logistics sorted we were pretty much ready to start packing for our winter adventure. As we all discussed, along with needing the usual snow boots and skiing gear, there are still things such as National Parks Pass that you must have in order to park at any of Australia’s ski resorts. Luckily, for Disabled Parking Permit holders these passes are significantly discounted and provide you with free access to any National Park within New South Wales.
For us, our final preparations were to book a dinner at the Japanese restaurant Takayama Restaurant Bar as well as a lunch at the Wildbrumby Schnapps Distillery both of which were very accomodating, had funky environments and absolutely amazing food. Once we had all of these steps sorted, we were all good to go and as you can see from the video below we definitely made the most of the trip!
So if you’re now thinking of planning a ski trip next winter we suggest that you definitely plan ahead and we hope that the steps we have mentioned here help you with smoothly planning your own skiing adventure next season. We ensure you that it will be worth it and hope to see you hitting the slopes. See you next winter!!!