Jackrabbitt

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Team Jackrabbitt 09

Travelling 1700 miles, collecting 580 points, visiting 23 slopes…Team Jackrabbitt arrive at their final desitination!

All the Snowball rally teams at the start

Well, we got into MK at about 6:20pm, nice and early! We hung around for a bit, had a cup of tea and some flapjack, then headed to the slope for some freestyle fun. Impressively Nic decided to go for the Snowcamp rail…a bit of a monster! After a few attempts she nailed it, and people saw it too which doesn’t usually happen! Gandy did his first (i think) rail and was very proud! Me and napper hit the kicker which required more speed than we gave it credit for! So after an hours playtime in fancy dress (what we had worn all 3 days, but others had just put on) with monkeys, cows, dustbins, and soo many more costumes, we headed up for the final prize giving.

Tom...boogies?!

Rich Brown gives Nic what she deserves

The atmosphere in the room was amazing, you could wander round and talk to anyone and know that you could have a laugh about the last 3 days events and make some good friends. I hope that we can keep in touch with all those that we met and from this connection we have made have some sort of reunion event in the future. There were prizes for 1st, 2nd and 3rd in the rally, so the people with the most points…Team jackrabbitt didnt quite make it into the top 3, but well done to those that did! The Kernow Sessions team got the trophy and the holiday for first place, so welldone to them boys, awesome bunch of lads who have still got loads of charity stuff going on and rocking some of the best facial hair and tats I have seen in a while! So then onto best fancy dress, which went to the guy who wedged himself into a dustbin and stuck a dummy on the front…GENIOUS! Clear winner…although…I absolutly loved batcow! Then onto the Fundraiser award…TEAM JACKRABBITT! We won a weeks holiday with P and V Holidays! Wooop woop! The fact that we managed to win that award in 2 weeks just goes to show how much support our friends and family will provide for a good cause. So thank you to everyone who helped us out, even if not with money but just words of encouragement, it all means a lot!

Team Kernow Sessions...WINNERS!

Team Jackrabbitt...BEST FUNDRAISERS

Then after all the prize giving, we went on to boogie on down to the tunes til quite late. Team jackrabbitt had an awesome adventure and will not forget it! Welldone to all those involved, and a special word up to the Are We There Yet? team, who were such good fun and insanly thoughtful! You rock as riders and inspire as people, keep it up

Winners

All that said and done…3 days later and I am still sleep deprived…totally worth it! Cheers Jackrabbit

Fully aware that this is anybodies race, we decided to head out on 2 hours sleep, circulating the sleepers and drivers in the back! We got out the house much faster too because we’re learning from our mistakes that there really is very little time to hang around to meet the slopes closing times. We started our thir dna final day off by darting across the country to get on Gloucestershire Ski & Snowboard Centr eat the 10 am opening, only to get there and find out that there had been a visit from another team at 9:30…sneaky sneaky (we regret not thinking ahead and trying that one ourselves!) This slope was a strange one combining both dendex and snowflex half way down one of their two slopes. The result was a steep incline of snowflex that had been worn down to wood in places which made all 4 of us fall flat on our faces, and then the soaking wet dendex catapulted us to the bottom (it was raining). All in all, we only gave this a rating of 2 carrots because the staff didn’t really seem that enthusiastic and the slopes bizarre combination of materials was getting a bit old and was covered in wet leaves. We got the impression it wasn’t very well loved

Next we headed down to Avon Ski Centre, Bristol, swapping drivers because the lack of sleep forced shorter turns on the wheel. We liked this slope for all sorts of reasons! The centre itself had alpine styling and it was surprisingly tall (made it steep for a painful fall or two!). This, and the lengthy lift over a bridge gave the impression of being a bit more… “alpine”? We could see this being even better on a nice day and not raining down on us! Unlike some of the simpler straigt courses this also curved around two corners which forced you to practice your carved turns more which is good! Dendex made this REALLY painful when it went wrong though! Ouch! We gave Avon ski centre a very respectable 4 and a half carrots. I awarded them the extra half a carrot because the staff were pretty...

Glostashur!

Rain now getting heavier by the minute we pushed on down to our first 50 pointer. Hooray! If you ever try to find Clifton Sports Centre, please, please enter from the north of Exeter rather than do what we did and make a tiredness induced satnav mistake and end up having to drive through the entire town. Exeter was traffic HELL. All the roads crossed over each other with seemingly no structure whatsoever and each was packed to stand still with cars. THIS IS NOT GOOD IN A RACE!!! Amazingly this is the first real traffic proble mwe came across in the entire three days but ironically today is the most impossible route… So losing an hour in the depths of exeter may be our undoing when it dcomes to the results!

Eventually we found the slope, after accidently driving up a field, but the woman there VERY kindly let us on an hour and a half before the next available slot. She earns carrots for this The run itself was as average as they get really. Nothing bad about it, but nothing that stands it out above the rest. A simple straight gradient with our first ever rope lift, pretty short and in the middle of nowhere. We actually prefered the simple rope lift to the nasty wakeboard-esque lift handles but we figured this is only really any god for a couple of runs. Give it an hour and you wouldn’t be able to use your arms any more! Two and a half carrots? Yeah, Exeter needs a bigger slope and less traffic!

Pouring rain

Frustratingly for the entire team, because of the traffic problems, our insanely tight schedule (and pretty impossible from the start) had to be altered as we went along. This meant Plymouth was out of the question, losing us another 50 pointer! So we decided to pop dow to torquay, grab another cheeky 50 points and then see what we could do along the way back to Milton Keynes, where we have to be at the finish line for 7pm at the latest else we may as well have stayed in bed!

Torquay Apline Ski Slopes was in the middle of nowhere! This was kind of good because it meant the slope was huge but it also meant we felt a bit like we were on crystal maze, making our way through intercommed coded security gates, several locked doors and dead ends, a few flights of stairs etc. Hard to judge this one really because while the gear was unloaded we fiddled with the satnav (our best friend and worst enemy) and to our horror, if we ignored any of the four possible slopes we were thinking of visiting, we still wouldn’t get back to Milton Keynes till 6:30… This was our final slope whether we liked it or not! Overall we only awarded it 2 carrots because of the confusing access and lack of signs or people!

Again...rain (torquay)

And so ends our frantic final days slopes! I’m writing this in the car as we pin it back up the country to a final run at Milton Keynes. Miss satnav lady is predicting 6:26 but the weather is getting worse and worse so we can barely see the roads. In a few hours we’ll have the results of the first ever Snowball Rally! Mood in the car is optemistic because we know the end is in sight and we’ve ever stopped hitting slopes. Everything we’ve heard from the slopes indicates we’re hitting a lot more slopes than others…. but its the ones we havn’t heard of that we’re scared off! We’re a little disapointed in ourselves because I think we all assumed 37 would be achievable. Once opening times were revealed and the car hit the road though, we’ve had to accept its probably physically impossible (unless we’re proven otherwise). The scariest thing is this being the first ever competition. We have absolutely no idea how well we’ve done whatsoever! Fingers crossed!

Jackrabbitt Tom

After an epic dash across country we got to Xscape in Castleford for 10.58pm…. it closes at 11pm! Its a pretty busy night spot so we got some great laughs as three orange suited jackrabbitts legged it through all the bars. Its an excellent facility with great snow as you’d expect, however we only felt that we could give it a four carrot rating as after meeting so many fantastic people across the country we all felt it was a pretty inpersonal place.

Jackrabbitt Crew

A horde of Jackrabbitts came to meet us from all over the country and it was a surreal and amazing reunion as there were a few that we hadn’t seen for quite a while as well as some new JR’s that had been brought along by people. They’d all spent the full evening hitting the slopes so by the time we all piled into a bar for a catch up there was an epic sized pile of boards outside.

We met Pudsy at Bassingbourn at 4am!

12:30am we headed straight down to Bassingbourn dry slope, who were doing a 6 – 6 sponsored ski for children in need! The people were so amazingly awesome we actually stayed about a half hour longer than intended…cakes and tea…perfection! This was at 3:30 in the morning by the way…and on a military base…of course! It was a good experience due to having to sign in and get id cards etc…”PLUS THE GUY HAD A GUN” says napper! So because of this, we give the slope 4 and a half carrots! The best so far!

Then we headed back to huntingdon, nics house for a much deserved 2 hours sleep…busy day ahead of us!

Cheers to the jackrabbitt crew who came down to see us and gave us such a good welcoming and departing thing! We love all you guys

Scraped ourselves from our beds after a minor sleeping in incident (slept through 5 alarms!), and decided on full board pants under the overalls when we saw the weather tipping it down outside.

Instant traffic...just add water

On the road by 8am heading for Tallington first, its based in the middle of a caravan/ adventure holiday park, surface was dendex which isn’t our favourite, the slopes long and appears to be purpose built as there be no hills for miles around. Carrot rating of a three overall. Not the best but the whole site as a location looks like its got alot to do.

Swadlincote was next, friendly staff, really enthusiastic. Bizarre way of getting to the lift by sliding down a winding dendex path to the bottom which was more than a little bit tricky on not much sleep, and could probably do with some better maintanence. The same could be said for the lift which was pretty narrow and saw more than one of us slipping off the edge living up to our names by hopping up the side of the slope. The slope itself had a good gradient and is a fair length permasnow , well maintained with fast riding. The site also has a luge style run around the slope that looks like fun (no time for us though). Carrot rating of 4.

Heads up! Small electrical fire in the front of the car, turns out if you run a sat nav and a laptop from one cigarette lighter bad things will happen! “Jackrabbit fire safety – Knowledge through stupidity”.

Quick JR photo shoot

Got a call from our guys in Carlisle after this to tell us the slope was underwater… normally this would seem like a challenge but they’d gone and closed the thing as well, so that took a 50 point option out of the game for us.

After Swadlincote we headed for Birmingham Centre and the Ackers slope. Its tucked away at the end of an endless little track with some hardcore speedbumps that sent our kit flying a few times. Guess the local boy racers used to have some funtimes around here. Slope was a dendex and a pretty average length but had a nice little lump at the bottom for jumping off. More friendly staff who were really into the rally. Rate it 2 Carrots but we’d probably give it three if we were located in Birmingham as its a tricky one to get to.

ACKERS

From Birmingham we headed to Telford. More Dendex but amazingfly nice to ride! Guessing some upkeep really pays off with this stuff. Lift up was cool as well, managed to spare the groin injuries for a change and we all got down with zero spills. Rate it four purely for the feel good factor. A really easy going slope.

SCRAM TIME

Switch of drivers then shot up the motorway to Runcorn where landscape gave way to a more destitute urban sprawl compared to the swanky villages we’d piled through earlier. The guy at the slope was pretty sweet and gave us some little certificates as well as taking a team shot so spot on for that. Slope itself was yet more dendex with a bar tow which are a real strain on the arms after a few goes. The riding itself wasn’t the worst and there were some slalom poles left out to play with on the way down. Carroty goodness of two for this slope, it would of been one without the friendly welcome.

Another heads up, the mileometer just ticked over to 1,000…. it doesn’t go higher than this so we’re back to 1, another 600 to pile on tomorrow!

Ski Stoke

Right now we’ve just hit two more slopes, Ski Stoke which was really nice dendex. Excellent lift which was zero effort to use. Group opinion was that this is how dendex is meant to be! Slight prob with Andy’s binding as the high back came off and we had no way of fixing it! Overall rating for this slope was a four.

After this we shot across to Kidsgrove and arrived to total blackness as they were just opening up. This slope is ran as a club and the two members that we met were great! Andys board was taken off to a workshop and two bolts bodged together to hold the high back in place. Meanwhile we all took a couple of runs mindless of the sprinklers that were running to dampen the slope. After several face plants into sprinklers we picked up Andys board and headed off,gutted that we didn’t have time for a cup of tea with the nice people and all slightly cleaner than we have been since we started! Rating has to be a four and half, great people and a great vibe.

Kidsgrove using Play grass (lovely people there, offering a cuppa!)

Right now we’re going to try and hit a few more slopes and end up in Castleford Xscape hopefully in time to ride with a few other friends who have road tripped to meet up there from London and Carlisle.

Well we started this morning with 3 hours sleep… and we’re just about to get 3 hours sleep again but we managed to hit 9 slopes today! We finished at Brentwood that very kindly stayed open for us in a mad dash. Seemed like a nicely layed out place but the lifts were absolutely bizarre, kind of like wake board handles and in NO WAY snowboarder friendly! We were a mess! We found the slope fairly well maintained but also a bit slow, so for these reasons we’re giving it 3 carrots! We can’t rate Bromley because they wouldn’t stay open for us! It was worth a cheeky phone call or two though

woop woop jackrabbitt.net

Anyway, we’re all off to bed now, totally exhausted mentally and physically. Current team moral is almost impossible to work out because we’re all so tired! Its been great fun so far though, and tomorrow we plan on hitting the midlands and north to gain much larger points… but this time we’ve had a days practice! We’ve got it down to an art!

Bowles in Tunbridge Wells, i think

Bye for now! Jackrabbitt Tom