Richy Rich Snowbunny Skiin'

A week and a half ago, my sister Robyn and her husband were in town on an annual ski vacation and she called me... with the best news ever!! She had 6 free lift tickets to Park City and 6 to Deer Valley that they didn't use! So she gave them to me. What a sweet deal, huh?

So on Saturday last, Jen and Linda and I were able to enjoy a different caliber of skiing... at Deer Valley. In the morning it was terribly icy, but that was too be expected as we have had 2 weeks of 60+ degree weather--so we mostly stuck to the groomers. After one run we decided to go shopping for Jen a new hat. We checked out the ritsy snow gear that I had no idea even existed! Try a $730 parka on for size! Some designers just don't have taste--there were some nasty coats in those shops. Anyway, we took another run and then we had a little photo-shoot. We got one of the on-mountain photographers to take a picture of us--or so we thought. He ended up taking somewhere around 20 photos of us in four different poses! One standing together with my skis crossed in front, another with me sitting on the ground in front of Jen while she put her hands on my shoulders, a third in the "best friend" pose where we are both sitting on our sides with our shoulders touching and then lastly in our skis in a natural pose with our poles between our skis and our right legs pushed out a bit. Who skis naturally with their poles between their skis!?!? Anyway, it was all I could do to not bust out laughing!!! It was such a crack up. Could we afford the photos? Of course not. One digital copy would have been $100 or else we could have gotten the cheapest print package for $34 (two 5x7s).

So then we went for another run and then we picked up Linda (she just skied a half day with us) and "Strike 3 Boy" (his story will come in a bit). Then we went to lunch and enjoyed a $9 burger and I had some carrot cake as well. I had to try out one of the original pastries mentioned in a cookbook I got for my birthday from two of my sisters: The Chocolate Snowball, which has pastry recipes from Deer Valley. (Way cool cookbook by the way--it has green circles, blue squares, and black diamonds to indicate how difficult a recipe is to make.) By then the snow had softened so we practiced our moguls for a run or two. And then we spotted some beach chairs and decided to take a little break and sun ourselves. (I don't have any pictures of myself, Jen and Linda took some of me with their camera phones--these pictures here are the ones I took with my camera phone.) Then we took another mogul run and flirted with three very cute patrollers. Jen and I are thinking we need to go up again and try to find those patrollers. :o) Then another run and we went back to the main lodge to take a look at our photo-shoot. And then that was our day! Wasn't it lovely? It was kind of a fun and different sort of pace for our skiing. Usually we are extremely hard core, but this was fun.

So the story about "Strike 3 Boy": Well, it all begins with me sending out a mass email inviting anyone to come with me--I wanted to share the joy of skiing for free and particularly since I will not be able to use all of the tickets by April 15th when both resorts close for the season. Well, one guy, whom I had never met before, emailed me saying he wanted to go and he gave me his phone number. So I responded and told him Jen and I were leaving at 8:00 am sharp. He didn't show. So I gave him a quick call and said, "Well, it is 8 o'clock and we are leaving right now. I guess we will catch you next time." Pretty clear message right--that he is sore out of luck? Not quite. He calls me around 10:00 am wondering if we have left yet and if he can still come.... I hesitated but I decided to be nice and I told him we would have to come back to the car to get the ticket out so he could use it. STRIKE ONE. A few minutes later he calls me and asks if Deer Valley allows snowboarding but if not he could bring skis. STRIKE TWO. (I wrote in my mass email that Deer Valley is for skiers only!) Then we went to pick him up and that is when he informs us that he has never been skiing before. STRIKE THREE!! Whoa. Jen gave him a quick 5 minute intro lesson to skiing and then we turned him loose on the mountain to fend for himself. (Jen used to be an instructor at Deer Valley.) The one redeeming quality about "Strike 3 Boy" is he was extremely grateful and thanked me many times for sharing the lift ticket with him. I am sure that is not the only quality about him, but in the short time span of our interaction, that was all I gathered.

Lesson learned: only email those whose skiing/riding abilities I am familiar with. Besides that, they are usually the only ones that come anyway. Just about every time I have gone skiing this season I have mass emailed and only those I knew already were the attenders.