All the gear and no idea

As most of you will be aware before I left Perth I had already leased my apartment for the season at Big White. The owner of my apartment (Cory) has been very helpful from the first email exchange offering helpful tips for getting to the hill and offering insights to working there through his job as the marketing guy for Big White and Silver Star Resorts in Vancouver and Seattle.

One such piece of advise was where to buy my snowboard and associated equipment and also not to actually buy the gear myself but rather identify what it is I wanted and then have him contact the store manager to make sure I get an appropriate discount.

So I spent two whole days in three stores (I know this sounds crazy but its a huge process) trying on innumerable combinations of boots, boards and bindings till I found a good set up at the right price. I also quickly learned that the 2009 ranges had just been released but a lot of 2008 stock was still available at heavily reduced prices as it was out of fashion...Consequently, I bought a lot of 2008 gear.

All good advice I had received was that when I buy my gear not to hold back on the boots - buy whatever pair of boots fits the best regardless of price. You spend a lot of time in them and they need to be comfortable. Following that, spend what you want to on a board and lastly get some bindings with what was left over...oh and then buy some pants, a jacket, goggles and a helmet...this was always going to be an expensive day!!

After nearly six hours of trying on boots in the stores I finally settled on these:

2008 Burton Shaun White Boots (Size 10)

I decided my stick would look like this:

2009 Nitro Team Board 157cm

And that I would join the two together using these:

2008 Rome Arsenal Bindings

At the end of the process including my jacket, pants and goggles I saved a consdiderable sum thanks to Cory and got a reasonable set up that I should not outgrow through the season. The only down side is that none of it really matches so there is no fear of me being one of the cool kids on the hill. Not that the danger of that was ever very high!