Winter weekend getaways

Canada is a great place to live, and I have thoroughly enjoyed my 13+ years living in the Great White North. But I confess that the winter months still make me homesick, my sun-deprived self always demanding some sun rays and a vacation down South between December and March.

This year, however, a mid-winter vacation was not possible, so we overcame our cryophobia and decided to spend two 3-day weekends up North in Muskoka in February. Both mini-vacations went so well that I’m considering going for these cold getaways much more often from now on.

The first trip was to a place facing the beautiful Oxtongue Lake, just a few kilometres from the Algonquin Park West entrance:

Oxtongue Lake in Ontario, Canada

It was a weekend with clear night skies, no wind, cold temperatures and a full moon:

Frozen Oxtongue Lake under a full moon

The picture above is a bit crappy, but the actual experience of walking on the frozen lake covered by snow under a full moon was memorable. The snow absorbed the sounds and reflected the moonlight, the lack of wind and proper insulation made the night walking pleasant and a very unusual sensorial experience overall.

Also unusual was barbecuing under the snow:

Hummm… Picanha BBQ…

Best of all, we had the tobogganing hill for ourselves for most of the weekend:

L trying solo tobogganing for the first time

And then doing it all by himself

Last weekend, we went back to Muskoka, this time close to Sparrow Lake. It was not as secluded as the other place, but it was good to try a variety of winter sports. The hotel offered free gear rentals for skating, cross-country skiing, snow-shoeing and curling. It was the first Winter Olympics weekend, and L was very excited in trying stuff he was seeing on TV:

First time donning skates

Snow-shoeing

Cross-country skiing

Saying that I have two left feet for winter sports is an understatement. I excel in being bad in all sports, but there’s no word to describe my performance (or lack thereof) with skis or skates. Hopefully, L will not inherit my total ineptitude to brave snow and ice, and his newly discovered interest on winter sports will last beyond the Vancouver 2010 games. For the first time ever, I feel almost sad that the end of winter is already around the corner.

Maurren Higa Maggi, Golden Girl

This morning, Maurren Higa Maggi became the first Brazilian female athlete in track and field to win an Olympic medal, in great and dramatic fashion: gold in the long jump with a mark of 7.04 m, just 1 cm above the second place, the 2004 champion Tatyana Lebedeva from Russia. Here’s what made the whole difference:

Guess which one is Maurren’s foot 🙂

A short video about her career is here.

The video with the medal ceremony was in YouTube for a couple of hours, but it’s gone now.

There’s one advantage in being from a country with very few gold medals: when you do get one, it’s so special that’s hard to describe 🙂 .

You can google her name and find all about her in the news, so I just want to highlight the facts that made this my favourite story in this fantastic edition of the games.

• Maurren was born in Sao Carlos, a city where my sister lived for many years, so she makes the Olympic dream something much closer to my reality than Phelps, Kobe Bryant or Usain Bolt.
• She’s a dedicated mother and mentions her daughter Sophia in every interview: she apparently positions herself as mother first, athlete second.
• She went to sports hell twice and came back: favourite in Sydney 2000, she got injured during the qualification round and had to quit the competition. In 2003, she tested positive for the steroid clostebol, and was sanctioned with a 2-year suspension. She claimed a doctor had applied a healing cream containing the substance to a cut she received during a hair removal process, and was cleared at the national level but not by the IAAF.
• She was so upset with the occurred that she shut down, and could not even hear about training again. Her father said that in one occasion she stormed out of the house and drove her car away just because somebody suggested she could go back to training.
• At that time, she lived the glitz of another sports: she married then Brazilian Formula One driver Antonio Pizzonia – father of Sophia – and went to live in Monaco. It’s interesting to notice that her Wikipedia entry mentions Pizzonia, but Pizzonia’s entry ignores her, even though she’s been arguably much more successful than him. They are not together anymore.
• Asked if, at 32, age would be an issue to win the medal, she reportedly said: “I’m not afraid of that. Heike Drechsler won the Olympic title at the age of 35, so everything is possible,” she said.”
• Contrary to many Brazilian athletes competing in Beijing, Maurren has a Brazilian coach, Nelson Moura, who’s also the coach of Panama’s Irving Saladino, who won the men’s long jump competition Tuesday to claim his country’s first-ever Olympic gold. The two athletes live and train in Sao Paulo.
• I’m not sure about her heritage, but I would guess by her last names that she’s got some Japanese and Italian background. It was funny to hear in the Canadian broadcast people calling her “Maggie”.
• Sophia told Maurren after the win: “I wanted the silver medal, mom!”