Life Signatures

We were all pretty excited about our first ski trip of the season. Granted we weren’t skiing in Aspen or Steamboat or Telluride so the conditions were somewhat of a crap shoot. Every year we go to Elk Mountain in northern PA. It’s also only about 20 minutes from my parents’ home where we have a free place to stay and Chef Nanna to cook us great food. You can’t beat it.

Lost and Confused Adolescent Teen Daniel came with us again so we had three Lost and Confused Adolescent Teens along with the dog and the cat.

It’s where I learned to ski. My first ever trip up the mountain was on the wrong ski lift and I ended up coming down on my butt on a black slope. I don’t know why that didn’t deter me from ever skiing again, but I have more tenacity than smarts so to speak.

And I’m glad I didn’t give up. Because the kids really enjoy the experience. Most of the time they even like to ski.

The last couple of years, the boy wanted to ditch his skis for a snowboard, it’s cool you know.

The girl does ski and pretty well. Although she says “jumping horses is my thing, not skiing.” She was also suffering from a head cold all weekend.

But she was a real trooper. She was out there all night, both nights, unlike yours truly. We strapped her to skis when she was 7 years old and now she doesn’t fall at all. She’s kind of a delicate skier, every part of her is dry.

You can’t tell she had a head cold. She’s a pretty tough chick.

Next year she wants to start snowboarding, like her brother and his friend.

I told her that snowboarders spent a lot of their time on their butts, like the boys here. They were soaking wet by the end of the night.

But I think she feels confident enough now to try something new.

We skied at night so as to avoid the crowd. There were very few people on the mountain, we were skiing with an elite group of not-so-smart-skiers. We had about an hour of daylight, then the lights came on and it was a totally different atmosphere.

The fog started to come in. The kids loved it

because it apparently made it even more fun. They said they couldn’t see a single thing at the top of the mountain. Fun? Apparently.

The husband was not innocent in this craziness. That’s him, on the very left of the picture, doing his best to set a bad example.

There’s the girl…

coming out of the fog, straight at me. I’m sure she knows how to stop.

Where was I in all of this?

Well, I was sitting in the lodge with a glass of wine of course. I did say that I learned to ski on this very mountain as a teen-ager. I also dislocated my knee pretty badly when I was about 16, on this very mountain. I was taken down the mountain by medics in a stretcher-sled-like thing. Now as a middle-aged woman, my knee will sometimes talk to me. It was talking to me this weekend and it was saying “Don’t do it.” I listened for the first night but the second night…well, I couldn’t sit and watch everyone else have fun.

All these pictures were taken from the bottom of the mountain. Tomorrow, I’ll show pictures from the top, yes, I went to the top with my camera, at night, with a bum knee, on icy northeast ski conditions.

The husband isn’t the only one setting a bad example.