Well this is ridiculous

Over winter break, my daughter asked me if I'd like to go skiing sometime and we realized it was a possibility over the long weekend. There was no snow to speak of in the east, so I looked into Colorado, and there were cheap flights to Denver and decent accommodations available in Vail, so off we went. It's a crazy thing to do, given everything going on in my life, but we did it.

The trip over here was one of my all-time worst travel experiences, though not up to the prolonged agony of our 3 days in China waiting for our luggage to possibly show up. Our 6:30 flight left an hour and a half late and got in an hour late, and then baggage claim took forever an featured a conveyor belt jam when my bag and a backpack got wedged in the chute. This inexplicably took 15 minutes to clear, so rather than leaving for Vail, a 2-hour drive away, at around 9:30, we left somewhat after 11.

The interstate going west of Denver traverses several mountain passes and by the time we left it had begun to snow, so going was difficult- our car did not handle very well in the snow. I've driven in snow and ice many times in cars that don't handle well, so I wasn't frightened, but it was very slow and arduous and took nearly twice the time to get here as it would have with clear roads. So between the delays and the roads instead of getting to Vail around 11:30, which was the plan, we arrived in town around 2:30 AM exhausted. Then, because of all the snow were unable to get the car up the driveway into the condo parking lot. We tried 2 different driveways for all different angles for nearly half an hour, but never got more than halfway up.

So we left the car there briefly while we unloaded luggage and then I went and parked in a lot that I'd noticed not too terribly far away. But by the time I got back to the condo it was 3:15 mountain time, which felt like 5:15AM to the two of us. We went right to bed, of course.

We had a lesson planned for the first afternoon, so we got up as late as we could manage. I walked to the nearest convenience store to get breakfast stuff, ate and then went over to rent our equipment and have our lesson.

Amazingly, we had a great afternoon skiing, but that's another story.