Comedy of Errors

Unfortunately I don't have any pictures to accompany any of the following stories, but as you can imagine, dramatic faces ensued on each.

Last week JR started Snowburners. (For my nonDurangoan readers: Snowburners is 8 weeks of half-day ski lessons for the local kids.) We have a high school babysitter (that we love) that comes each Saturday to watch the babies. Which means Jason and I get to ski together in the morning while JR is at lessons, and then we ski with him in the afternoons.

The first Saturday went off without a hitch, but yesterday was one blunder after another.

-It started with Jason and I skiing on the backside of the mountain. We needed to get to the bottom front to pick up JR from lessons. We were on a terrible run that was just straight across (think cross-country skiing) and my arms were getting tired. Finally I said, "I'm done with this, let's just ski down here and find another way to get down." It was a blue run, which we ski all the time, but after a little way down we discovered it was all moguls. If you don't ski they looks like this:

Jason did amazing; I was really impressed. Me? Yeah, not so much. There were 3 other girls on the same run with us who were struggling too. We were all laughing saying, "I thought this was a blue!" I finally just sat down and took off my skis. With skis in one hand and poles in the other, I slid down on my butt. Jason was so embarrassed he could have died. And I could have cared less. Jason says I squealed the whole way down...but I think I was only squealing when I started going too fast. It's harder than you'd think to butt slide while holding your skis and poles! (BTW, one of the other girls that was having trouble did the same thing.)

-After picking up JR, we headed back over to the main ski lift. It's a 6 person lift and they have little individual gates that automatically open when it's your turn. The gates opened, Jason and I went through, and as we were about to sit down we noticed JR wasn't with us! He hadn't gone fast enough and the gate had shut. Jason screamed, "Wait!", as I looked back to see pitiful JR face looking back at me from behind the gate. The lift operator told us to sit down and Jason said, "Are you going to make him ride by himself?!" Luckily one of the ski patrol medics was right there and said, "I'll bring him." In actuality JR probably had more fun getting to overhear all the "ski business" on the medics walkie-talkie than riding with us anyway.

-After the ski lift fiasco, we were skiing along and I saw Jason go flying though the air. I yelled to JR, "Look JR! Daddy's doing a jump!" But ya know, the most important part of the jump is the landing. And as I saw Jason bouncing off his chest with snow, skis, and poles flying through the air...I'd say it wasn't such a successful jump. In fact, he had about half a dozen people stop to see if he was okay. A true sign of a wipe-out. (In Jason's defense, he wasn't trying to jump, he just came upon a drop that was a lot steeper than he had anticipated.)

-And our final "error" of the day...We were all getting tired and trying to head home. I was convinced a certain run would put us out right where we wanted to be. I couldn't have been more wrong. It actually put us out at the ski lift mid mountain...the one we had just been on...which we had to take again. We were literally in one of those "you can't get there from here" kind of situations.

Needless to say, we're all a bit sore today. Here's hoping for some non-erroneous ski days in the future!