Colorad-snow

See what I did there? Because it's Colorado but there's lots of snow there, especially this time of year. Oh, you got that. Ok then.

So yes, Colorado. Good times. Last you heard we'd gone to the skating on New Year's Eve. It was a really fun way to spend it. I'm not the biggest fan of New Year's, all a bit of an anti-climax, but this was cool.

A proper pose from my camera. That's the lakehouse in the background you can see. I've read afterwards the lake provides 8 acres of ice. Needless to say we didn't skate on all of it.

They had these fire pits all around the rink and gave out skewers and marshmallows. Nice.

There were a few ice sculptures around the place, added to the atmosphere.

It's a bear!

But these on the way out were hard to beat. Life size ice sculptures!

We were excited for 2011.

With 2011 underway it was time to get down to skiing. Except that it was freezing. Like I said reportedly -25c. So we took down the Christmas tree instead. It was quite the job actually, being as it was 16ft tall.

We had a competition to see who could find the last decoration on it. And I'm happy to tell you, Princess fans, I won! Thank you, I'd like to thank my mum, my dad and of course, my optician.

So with the tree down and temperatures closer to zero (fahrenheit) we got down to the business of skiing. We were skiing in all new places this year, which was exciting. If we were sad about not skiing in some of the places we loved other years, we forgot about it getting off the first chairlift of the trip.

Ah the Rockies.

I do heart a blue sky.

We were only two days into our skiing adventure when disaster struck, Megann got hurt when she fell. I didn't see what happened exactly. I saw her on the ground, trying to get back up and it seemed to be taking a while, so while I waited downhill I watched a real life rescue of another skier. He was being bundled into one of those stretcher things for ski patrol to take him down. Eventually Megann made it over to me and promptly fell again. I realised something was wrong when I worked out that she was crying and not laughing. I took my skis off and ran up to her and struggled to get her skis off. It was coming close to 4 o'clock and so the lift operators were making their way down. One of them, a girl on a snowboard, stopped beside us. With Megann lying on the ground, crying, and me sitting beside her she asked "Is she crying?".

I replied "Yes, she's crying!"

And with that she snowboarded off into the sunset, as it were. I thought for a second she was off to radio for help and then I realised how the conversation must have gone from her end:

"Is she fine?"

"Yes, she's fine!"

Oops. But who asks a question like that anyway. Wouldn't you say "is she ok?" or "is she alright?". So with the realisation that this girl wasn't off to get ski patrol, we thought about what to do next. The problem was with Megann's knee. That day I had brought with me the tape the physio gave me for my Nadal knee so because Megann thought she could give skiing a go at least, we taped that round her knee and set off. Thankfully we made it down the slope and back home. 

In the morning though, we her knee swollen, we decided that we should take a break from skiing. It didn't affect our lift passes, so it was a lazy morning in the house, a trip to the mall and my beloved Panera.

Fuji apple salad I love you.

The next day, Megann again felt that she shouldn't ski, so I went out on my own. I've never even so much as done a run on my own so this was a whole new experience for me. On my first chairlift up I changed my mind about four times as to what I was going to ski. We chose a good place, with lots at the base for Megann and well, slopes for me. I made Megann videos for her to see what it was like.

Yes, 'a wagon and a jump and a bridge and stuff'.

There were lots of photos of me like this that day.

Or like this.

Although there is a proper one too. The lady that took this picture interrupted my video making to get me to take a photo of her and her daughters so I got her to repay the favour. Plus it gave me the opportunity to explain that I wasn't talking to myself.

Excitingly, we skied at Vail this trip! When I first started dreaming of skiing in Colorado about the only ski places I had ever heard of were Aspen and Vail. Turns out that Colorado have tons of places to ski, ones that you don't need to sell a kidney to afford. But as I was throwing all caution to the wind with this trip this year, what the heck, ski at Vail?! Ok! And my goodness, you need to build up to it, it is huge. Massive. 

Brilliant!

This is me skiing down one of the back bowls. So normally there's the front side of the mountain, and some places have back bowls. Well Vail has a whole other part at the bottom of the back bowls - you don't have to get a lift back up to where you came from! Oh no, you can go to Blue Sky Basin! I love blue skies. I love Vail.

But there are a lot of catwalks to get you places on the mountain. Catwalks were not our favourite. They are slow and not very exciting.

This is on a catwalk. Otherwise known as the slow boat to China. That's Megann in the background. You daren't stop on a catwalk or you'll never get going again.

Who knew Vail was in continental Europe?!

They are just all about winter at Vail.

A chair made of skis! Clever.

Even though (or maybe because) we were skiing in all new places, I kept getting flashbacks of other places we've skied in Colorado. Like a certain run, a chairlift, or the lodge would remind me of somewhere else. At the end of our first day at Vail, I was skiing down to the base and was thinking how I hadn't had that feeling all day, that is was like nowhere else we had skied. Well the clever people at Vail must have realised that too because that's only their tagline (or words to that effect). 'Vail: Like nothing on earth'. Ha!

I still maintain if the leaders of the world were to go skiing together there'd be less war.