JODI’S JAM – June 2026

Todd and I attended the Frankston and Mornington Peninsula Careers and Pathways Expo. This was our first time exhibiting. It was nice to chat with students from local schools (Years 9 to 12) about job opportunities at The Ranch. We have had a lot of work experience students over the last two terms and one of our current full timers (Murphy) did her work experience here last year (in yr 12) and is now doing a traineeship with us.

We are currently in Europe on a research trip. Our first stop was Dorset (UK), to visit Snowtrax – where they do dry skiing on an artificial surface called Proslope. Despite being there during a heat wave and on their hottest June day (36oC), we all thoroughly enjoyed it! It was actually good to experience it in that weather as it’s comparable to Summer at home.

With the sprinkler irrigation system, it was quite cooling. A massive thank you to Adam and Colin from Snowtrax. Side note – Colin is 75 and still out there skiing and taking lessons every week. Very impressive and inspiring! Also, a shoutout to Kevin 😉 from Proslope for coming down (to Dorset) to meet with us. What a great surface to try and have our first ever experience snowboarding on an artificial dry slope.

From Dorset we went to Munich, Germany. We were lucky enough to be here for the Munich Mash action sports festival. We had close access to watch the action of some of the best wakeboarders, mountain bikers, skaters, and BMX riders in the world.

We visited Wake Park Brombachsee, which was amazing to spend the day there. Having the beach zone was very cool. Thank you to Anne from WAKEPARX for meeting us there to go through their whole cabling system. The cable was so smooth and the park setup was a lot of fun! Thanks to Mat and Chi Chi for giving us access to the park.

The next day we went to WAKEPARX HQ to meet with Anne (again), Moritz and the rest of the team to have a behind-the-scenes workshop tour and discuss where our project is at. These guys have been so helpful throughout our whole journey and we’re very grateful for that.

We finished the last day of June with a Banger! We went to Banger Park in Austria! Wow! This is the biggest and best (dry slope) airbag facility in the world. To be honest, I didn’t think I’d be hitting the jumps, but I did and the airbags felt so good. Once again, we had a ball. A massive thanks to Tomas from PearlSnow who drove 10 hrs to meet with us and spend the day with us, to Patrick from Aqua Chimp who also especially did a 2 hr drive to see us (and will spend the next few days with us) and to Alex the owner and brains behind Banger Park! The innovation is absolutely phenomenal. He showed us around the whole park and organised a lesson for us with 6 mins notice. Thank you Traviss for your coaching. On a side note – the lunch at Lorenz was next level thanks to Alex and Thomas!

This is only a small snippet of what we have experienced in just over a week! We will be returning with knowledge, feedback, and experiences to share with the team. We are so grateful for everyone who has been so hospitable and we are having an absolute ball.
J ✌🏼