I recently took the kids to Loveland for their first ski day this season. We had a wonderful day skiing, being outside in the mountains, enjoying the mild temperatures (read: no whining because of being cold), spending time together and finding our ski legs after the long summer. The hard part was getting a decent photo.
We live in Denver and therefore are weekend warriors, meaning we pack in most of our skiing on the weekends, which can be tricky because weekends are also the time for sleeping in, errands, housework, and as the kids get older, other sports. That said, we try to have our cake and eat it too. Were not hitting the road at the crack of dawn in order to make first chair. So maybe warrior is the wrong word, were more like weekend procrastinators, but there is a method to our madness.
Leaving the house later yields less traffic, or in our case on this day, zero traffic. When we arrived at Loveland the early skiers were already leaving so we scored a parking spot super close to the lifts. The mild weather made it easy to get geared up in the lot and then we had just a short walk to the slopes. Plenty of snacks in the car kept the kids in a good mood and kept us from having to go right to lunch as soon as we arrived.
All things considered the early season skiing was good, man made snow mixed with natural snow from our most recent storm. But for us, and me in particular, its not all about the snow, its about being outside, being together, spending the day with my kids, trying to bank some memories of them as the wide eyed fun loving groms they are before they become teens and dont want to be seen with their mom in public.
With zero lift lines we were able to lap a few runs before we stopped and asked a fellow skier to take our picture. The bright sun must have made it hard to see the photo because the persons finger got in the picture. He skied away before I could ask him to take another one so I just deleted it.
After a few more runs we took a break for a snack. In the lodge we easily found a table and got some munchies and the three of us enjoyed some more time together. Back out on the hill we again we asked a fellow skier to take our photo, and again they put their finger in the picture. Two for two.
With just a little time left before lifts closed we took one more run. At the bottom we asked a third fellow skier to take our photo and finally, no finger in the picture.
We also resumed our apres-ski tradition of stopping at Starbucks on the way home: kids caramel cider, kids vanilla steamer, two pump medium chai tea latte with soy. (Quite different from my old days of pint of beer, pint of beer, pint of beer.)
