Over the long weekend I took advantage of our fall back into freezing cold temperatures. The ponds froze back up to decent depths, so we got out our skates and had some fun. This was the first time that I've skated on a frozen pond in many years, and it was a lot of fun. The last time was probably back in Albany, on Buckingham Pond.

The cool thing about skating on ponds is just the complete openness. It gives plenty of room to work on any sort of techniques, like backward skating, cross overs, speed drills etc. I took full advantage of having an extremely good skater give me tips on my form, and things to work on when stick handling.

The Japanese Garden was also a very beautiful and peaceful place to play. The ice was super thick and relatively smooth, probably from the 60 degree warm up last week. There was also no one else around aside from a few Pokemon Go players and a couple of bird watchers. 

It was extremely refreshing to get out into the open air and play around. No rules, just flipping the puck back and forth and trying to work on basic skills. It was a nice change of pace from the competitive games that I've dove right into since starting to play. Despite loosing a handful of pucks to poorly aimed saucer passes, overall it was highly enjoyable and something that I will try to make a point to doing more often, weather permitting.