Ski Trip Recap: Part One: It's not 1996 Anymore

Perhaps y'all might find it curious that I haven't written a Winter Lovin' post since I wrote a post about the things I love about Summer HERE and about Fall HERE.  Or perhaps you haven't given it a second thought because you don't occupy your days wondering what drivel I might write about on this here blog. Ahem.

The thing is that my feelings toward Winter lean heavily toward hate strong dislike.  But, I'm in the business now of counting gifts.  So when I see something like this,

I am going to clench my teeth and open my eyes wider.  I'm going to look hard because I am quite the big, fat, whiny-pants during the months of January to March/Aprilish around here. And being that I've been here for twenty years, it's pretty much time to cowboy up and find me some winter things to add to my list. Plus that 11 degrees was one week ago and today it's 60 degrees so at the moment, I'm feeling like winter ain't all that bad.

I've decided that a good place to start with Winter Lovin' is to re-cap our family snow ski adventure over the MLK holiday weekend to Wintergreen,Virginia because well, you know, it involves snow and winter.  Now, my Texas people:  maybe you aren't as dumb as I am or maybe you aren't as snobby as I am, but when I moved here I didn't realize people really snow skiied outside of Colorado, New Mexico and Utah.  And those of us who have only skiied "out west" as they call it in these parts, tend to be a little snooty-patootie about it.  And if you are me you just go all the way and imagine you are Picabo Street.

My husband lived "out west" for awhile and he can handle himself on skis, too, so the last time we went skiing, we did so with no small measure of confidence.  The problem is that the last time we skiied together was about 17 years ago.  We had been married for barely over a year and we went to Vail and Beaver Creek in Colorado.  We skiied the black slopes and took pictures of each other speeding down the mountain.  We were young and athletic and beautiful, despite my Rachel from Friends haircut. We thought we were pretty much it.  But, we weren't very smart apparently because all of those killer pictures of our sick moves on the mountain?  I have none because the film apparently was not accurately loaded in the camera.  Not one photo.  Darn you, 1996.

So when we strolled into Wintergreen last week, we found that besides the fact that we are seventeen years older now, there is another new phenomenon happening on the ski slopes of America.  All the cool kids snowboard these days.  And they are WAY cooler than we are.  The fact is that we weren't the hotshot young skiing couple anymore, we were just old-schoolers who were weighed down not only with a mess of children, but with two skis and ski poles, items which seem to soon be headed for life in a museum next to those tennis racket snowshoes.  Husband told me he knew exactly how he would handle this new fact.  His plan was that each time he passed a dude with a snowboard, he was just going to cock his head toward the guy and say the coolest thing he could think of, which he decided would be:

Word.

Which means that every time I passed a snowboarder whether he said anything or not, I laughed really hard. So hard that I might have snorted.

I don't think Picabo Street snorts when she laughs.

There is something else that happened.  I found my old ski pants in the back of my closet and threw them in my suitcase before we left.  The last time I wore my ski pants was 1996, but I was pretty sure that they would still fit.  The good news, I guess, is that they did still fit.  But you see, I forgot one important fact about 1996.  Y'all, let us think back to one of the mysteries of fashion in the 90s.  We wore the waistband of our pants a tad bit higher back then, as Kelly Taylor from 90210 demonstrates here.

 

 

If you don't get the gist, let me give you a closer look at what my ski pants looked like (minus the acid wash) :



It was not pretty.  I think my husband might have laughed so hard that he did the snort thing, too.  So, the moral of the story is that it doesn't matter if you can fit into the pants you wore in 1996.  Don't get all high and mighty and proud of yourself. Trust me. You don't want to do it.

Anyway, I did find my way to the ski lodge shop and bought myself some new ski pants with a waistband which hit me somewhere below my rib cage.  The difference in 2013 was that the guy in the ski shop had to read the size written on  the tag for me because I neglected to bring my reading glasses to the slopes with me. *sigh* 

Things started looking up when I ordered an adult beverage later that day and the 17 year oldish girl behind the counter asked for my ID.  Maybe it really was still 1996?! I almost hugged her, but told her that I left my ID with my reading glasses in the car.  So, she called her manager over to see if she should serve me anyway.

The manager looked at me, looked at her and I promise you . . . she snorted.

I left with one adult beverage and  the recognition that it is 2013. I did not spend my time on the black diamonds, but stuck to the greens with my kids who are learning how to shred on snowboards, not on skis.  We had a blast and in a future post, I'll share a gazillion cute pictures of my kiddos because I'm obnoxious like that.  But for today just this photo.  I like you, 2013, and I've definitely got something to add to my list of a thousand gifts that involves winter.  I'm totally stoked that seventeen years later, I still get to jump on that ski lift and ride high above the slopes, swinging my skis back and forth next to the coolest dude on the mountain.

Word.