with a little luck (and a lot of hard work): Traveling with skis...

by Alex

Although I don’t really notice much of a difference between the NIS plate bindings and regular bindings when skiing, the NIS plates win by a loooong stretch when it comes to traveling. It took a couple times to loosen them up enough to get them off easily, but now I can pop the bindings on and off in about 10 seconds a ski. This means that I can pack the skis flat on top of each other, and you can fit a helluva lot more skis into a bag than those with conventional bindings. Another bonus – if you pack the bindings in a small bag in the ski bag, it makes for easy access if your ski bag is too heavy and you have to take something out. So, the packing process usually takes about 45 minutes, start to finish, but that’s mostly because I tend to get distracted (lets not talk about the travel waxing, pole cutting, basket switching, and other equipment-related shenanigans that were going on last night – to top it off, somebody never cleaned her classic skis after the last race, thank god it was a cold one!). It starts with a big ol’ pile of equipment, taking over most of the living room floor. After checking the weather forecast, I ended up deciding to leave the skate slush skis at home, since all the skate races are in the beginning of the week (when the weather is hopefully more accurate), and leaving the harries at home, since worst case scenario I can always turn my powder skis into harries… lets hope I didn’t just jinx myself. Then the bindings come off, and the skis get taped together. So do the poles. Side story on poles… I broke a pole in Presque Isle (link), and so Alpina sent me a new shaft, in the form of this year’s poles. Little miss genius mis-measured the pole length, and cut them too sort – YES, I took the grips into account, I think it was just sloppy measuring. Anyway, they’re now about 1.5 inches too short, although given that I’ve been skating on poles that are slightly too long...

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