Skiing (or lack thereof)...

Today’s post was borne out of the fact that I woke up around 4am this morning (I fell back to sleep within a half hour) and this funny memory came into my mind. Steph will enjoy it because she was a part of it.

I have only skied once in my life. It was my sophomore year of college and a group of us went with a day trip sponsored through our campus.

I had never skied before and neither had Steph. Therefore, once we got all of our gear we took the little lesson they give all of the beginners. It did not do us much good because right after the lesson, as we tried to “walk” away on our skis, we both immediately fell down. We lay in the snow, on our backs like two turtles, and just laughed and laughed. We laughed so hard that we could not get up. People just proceeded to go around us and ignore us, but then finally, one of the guys on the trip with us came up to us (his name was Sergio) and looked at us with a look of disgust/pity and helped us both get back on our feet/skis.

We finally managed to get to the ski lift, which we took to the top of the bunny mountain. As any of you who ski know, when you get to the top of the mountain the lift just kind of “drops” you off. Well, when we got dropped off the two of us wound up on our butts again, laughing and laughing. People getting off of the lift that were behind us had to maneuver themselves around us. What a disaster we were, but I really remember just laughing so hard I was crying.

Luckily, we managed to get ourselves up that time and then we approached the top of the mountain. For me, my first run was total trial by fire because as I stood at the top of the slope, looking down, I began to slide down the mountain and I just wound up “skiing” (if you can even call it that), screaming at the top of my lungs, down the mountain. I was completely out of control. After the first hundred feet or so, I fell, both skis came off, my poles flew in opposite directions, and my earmuffs flew in another. I looked like Charlie Brown when Lucy pulls away the football as he’s trying to kick it and he flies in the air and everything flies off of him and he winds up in his underwear.

I gathered everything up, put it back on, and proceeded down the mountain for another hundred feet until the same thing happened again. I proceed to do this the entire way down the mountain until I reached the bottom. I had no idea where Stephanie was at that point!

I eventually got a little better as the day went on, but never enjoyed myself. I don’t like the “out of control” feeling. Funny thing is, I did snowboard years later, and I did like that more—I think because I had both feet on one board as opposed to two feet on two!