Saturday, April 11, 2009

Park City Ski Trip '09

It's about a month later, but I am finally getting around to posting about our ski trip! It was awesome! The weather was perfect. Sunny, about 50 degrees, perfect snow on the mountain, and really great friends with us. As described the hotel that we stayed at was literally on the mountain. In the mornings we would just get up, put on our skis, and skied to the lift. It couldn't have been a better location. We'd never been to Park City before, so we were really impressed by the the resort town that had been built up there. Very easy to see why the area had hosted the Olympics a few years back.

As children, William and I liked to think that we were world class skiers. In actuality, what that meant was pointing our (at the time) tiny skis down the hill with no worries about falling. It was with those memories, and a few more memories of us skiing in high school and college that we decided to take this trip. Naturally, as William's earlier post said, we were really excited about going skiing again!

It had been about 7 or 8 years since I had been skiing. I hyped myself up to William and our friends; saying that I was going to be going down double black diamonds by the end of the day. Sadly, that was not the case. It took William and I a few runs to get the hang of it again. And by mid-day, William was leaving me in his ski trails!! Just kidding... well, not really.

Our friend Brady, who is still a beginner at skiing, was somewhat overwhelmed with the fear of falling. She had mastered the snow plow, and every six feet or so would take a turn in the opposite direction to ensure that she would never go very fast. Her boyfriend and William were a perfect match at how fast they could go, so that left me watching out for Brady some of the day. The funniest part is that I would ski down the hill in front of Brady, come to a complete stop, look back at Brady, just to make sure she was okay.......and then I would fall on my face. Haha. I think I actually fell a totally of 6 times. Brady never fell once, her boyfriend never fell, and I am pretty certain I saw William doing back flips off the mountain, so he certainly didn't fall.

Just like our childhood memories there were lots of families and kids on the mountain. We noticed lots of little kids with helmets, no ski poles, a tinny pair of skis zipping past us with parents right behind them this year. The only thing missing on this trip was our little one, we cant wait to start a family tradition of going skiing once a year with our child!

All in all, we had a great trip! Great friends, great food, and lots of great skiing!

Thanks for reading!

JOHN

Saturday, April 04, 2009

Callaway Gardens

Anyone who knows us, or has read our blog, knows that one of the many things we're looking forward to doing as parents is taking our child to museums and parks. Today we went to the beautiful Callaway Gardens (www.callawaygardens.com) which proved to be another great place for kids to explore. Callaway Gardens is truly an amazing place. It's a huge garden that's spread over many acres of land (plenty of open space for kids to play and explore safely in), it also has a golf course and a Butterfly center. It was so nice. The weather, after many days of clouds and rain, was beautiful and it was great to see the azaleas and the butterflies. We started with the Butterfly Center. There were so many different kinds of butterflies; some were at least the size of an average bird. Then we went the to Azalea Trail which had acre upon acre of azaleas. Really beautiful! In the middle of the azalea area was a little man made pond that was full of turtles. They were resting on the shore in groups of five or so. It was neat to see them, as I hadn't really seen that many turtles in one place since I was a small child. Anyway, it was a lot of fun and a place we definitely look forward to taking our little one to some day!