ski bums for a day

We went skiing!  It’s kind of my secret and now I suppose public shame that I lived in Colorado for two whole years and never went skiing.  So lame!  I think I was just buried forever in a pile of crap-to-do, plus it was all kinds of expensive and yadda yadda, two years later I still hadn’t gone!  So it might be kind of sad that when we finally headed out for some mountain time, we went to the little baby slope of Shawnee Peak about an hour outside of Portland, but it was great!!

I think skiing in the Rockies always kind of terrified me a little, like my skills might turn out to not actually be “skills” per se when I was faced with a run that took an hour to get down.  Shawnee Peak was the perfect place to get back in the skiing saddle.  In fact, it was also the perfect place for JP who had never skied before.  (Side note, which I didn’t realized until my brother’s girlfriend mentioned it to me like weeks after, but technically JP’s first real time skiing was during that big ol’ snow storm after drinking whiskey and playing pinochle late into the night.  We slapped some cross country skis on JP and essentially pushed him down State Street.  HAHA, which is especially funny now that I realize that that was in fact his first introduction to skiing of any kind.  You can see blurry photographic evidence here.)

So, back to JP’s second first time skiing.  He had a lesson with a former Olympic skier, who even stayed after to take him down the Rabbit Run (a little steeper and longer than the bunny hill of course) a few times after his lesson ended.  

 And JP did great!  He pizza-d and french fry-d and pizza-d again!  My all-time favorite part of the whole day was watching him on the last run, coming down the pretty steep hill doing a sort of balancing dance move every time he switched back across the mountain.  It was absolutely hilarious and perfect.  When he got to the bottom he even asked “did you see my moves out there?!”  I did, I definitely did.   

The day was just so much fun, I had forgotten how great it is to be out in the snow enjoying the season! And mom, check out that buff keeping  my neck warm, what would I do without it?!