Racki was working a lot in the hotel and so I had a lot of time.
My main activities: snowboarding, making music and hanging around with Racki in the hotel.
After a couple of days my snowboarding improved rapidly and soon I was discovering the whole mountain and all the tracks and off track areas.
Especially riding in the fresh deep snow in the morning was awesome! It was so awesome to go up with the lift and see all the untouched snow and minutes later to ride on and through it.
After some more practice, I started to do little jumps and riding fakie which was a whole new world to me.
When Racki had nothing to do in the hotel, we rode together and it was absolutely awesome!
Our cars had been stuck in a parking lot for weeks when a massive excavator came and cleaned the masses of snow in the parking lot.
The massive machine had a lot to do with it and in the end I gifted the driver a bottle of wine.
Living in Gudauri at 2200m during winter was an interesting experience. Things change a lot with the cold. Of course Rosinante’s heater was running a lot. And I had to clean our cars from the snow because sometimes the layer of snow was nearly a meter thick after a night of snowfall.
Once while cleaning the cars, a tourist family from India came by and asked if they may clean parts of the snow because it looks interesting and they never had to do it in their life. I was happy to let them do so and they had a lot of fun.
We couldn’t open Rosinante’s roof because the heater was not able to maintain the warmth with the popped up roof and so our living space got much more limited and we had to deal with humidity and ice on the inside of some parts of our camper cabin. But we did very well and it was adventurous.
In the beginning we tried to use the heater as little as necessary, but next time I’d just keep it running all day and night and regulate the temperature by opening the windows more or less.
And the route leading to Gudauri was crazy. After Gudauri this road leads to the only real border between Georgia and Russia and so all the trucks have to take it.
Because of the changes in temperature, the trucks and everything else, the condition of the roads got worse. One of the sharp corners broke so much that trucks got stuck for hours blocking the whole road. Other times the mountain pass leading to the border or the border itself got closed and all the trucks got stuck in Gudauri on the road. No chance to turn back or go further.
Whoopy’s refused to turn on after some nights with about -18 degrees Celsius and so she had to wait until the temperatures had risen again. But then it started without any problems.
And from time to time we had the best pizza in all of Georgia!
