The Dip

On Christmas Day 2010, our son Sandro, 6 at the time, got a freeboard from Santa. We were lucky that year, that we had a White Christmas. So he grabbed his freeboard and sled and we headed over to our local hill. There are not too many places to sled in our hood, but we had what locals called Dead Man’s Hill. A street closed off to traffic that lies parallel to a cemetery, in Washington Heights, NYC.

Our son got on his freeboard and rode down the hill like he had been doing it his whole life. Ray and Alicia had not skied in since 1997, and Ray's last trip skiing was February 1, 2001, but they could remember the feeling immediately. She looked at him and he looked at her, and he said “how about we start skiing again?” and so Alba Adventures began.

As a husband and wife team we have had no formal education in filmmaking though we have taken upon ourselves to learn this craft by trial and error, and by leveraging our photography skills to help to shoot stories. Needless to say, our work had vastly improved over the years, with many stories viewed thousands of times and us developing a small online following; knowing we still had and have so much still to learn about producing, editing and storytelling.

We now produce about a bit more than a dozen short videos a year and while we travel, particularly skiing, we often hear people yelling from the chairlift "The Alba Adventures".