Dustin and I went to Winter Park, CO to attempt skiing for the first time. Truly, I did not feel like getting into a bathing suit and so I tried to think of a good angle to steer Dustin away from our usual annual trip of going to the beach! I worked the "Expand our horizon, try something new" angle VERY hard and got my reluctant husband to agree to it. When we flew into Denver, there was a big snow storm, so we had to drive into the mountain in a snow storm, that was not fun, I was a nervous wreck. The next day we went skiing. We missed the ski lesson by 10 minutes and the next one wasn't for 4 hours so we decided to naively attack the mountain. We went to a smallish hill that had a lift that pulled you up the hill by sticking this thing between your legs, that was fun! It took me forever to get down that little hill. About a third of the way down I fell and could not for the life of me get up. I thought I was going to dislocate my knee or break my ankle trying, I was getting very frustrated and tired from trying to pull myself up and I thought skiing was CRAP. After about 10 minutes I manged to get up. When I finally made it down the hill I asked the lift operator how to get up when you fall and he told me how to do it. Right after that I was heading up the lift again and fell over. I was mortified. This time it took me a few moments to get up. My shins were hurting from the devils invention (aka. ski boots) and I was getting this awful "brain freeze" type headache that would not subside. I could not understand what was alluring about skiing at all. Walking around on skis is a joke, every scoot forward I'd slide two scoots back, not fun! I decided to ditch the boots, the lesson and the husband to go back to the condo and relax in the private sauna and read my book, it was GREAT! Dustin came back a couple of hours later after having a fun time. He said the lesson was kind of a waste, they taught him how to stop and took him down some slopes. The following day we went to Golden, CO and shopped at the CO Mills Mall and watched 3 movies (Valkyrie, 7 Pounds, and Twilight) and ate out. This is stuff we don't normally do at home so we were taking advantage of being kid free. We had a great day together. The following day, we decided to go sledding, as I didn't want to ski ever again, we went to this place to sled and it was a pathetic little hill so we decided to try skiing again. I'm so glad we did. I got a better ski boot this time, so much more comfortable (thanks to my huge feet, I got an upgrade, the basic boot did not go up to size 10). (After my pregnancy my feet went from size 9 to 10!) Dustin and I did the small hill acouple of times and then headed up the real ski lift to tackle some bigger ones. The ski lift was fun, I tried to identify the different animal tracks I saw and argued with Dustin as to what they were. Some of the lifts made me want to vomit as there was nothing holding you in and your dangling far above the ground. So we would ski down the slopes right back to the line going back up the lift so we would not have to walk/scoot along at all. We never had to wait longer than a minute to get back up the lift, which was very nice. We did this several times, and I have to brag a little, I only fell 1 time the whole day. Dustin bit it several times. A couple of times his skis would fly off and people would have to grab them for him and bring it down to him. After this experience, I could totally see the allure of skiing, I can't wait to go back and try it again! We had a great time together and really appreciated mom or taking such great care of the kiddoes!
