Eleven-Fifty

Image from here

Eleven-fifty.
Ride up and ski down.
Eleven-fifty.
Sit down in the lift, whoosh down the run.
Eleven-fifty.

I woke up to the radio telling me it was -7 and "one of those mornings when it's best to get a cup of coffee or hot chocolate and crawl back into bed." Ignoring the radio, I assembled 4 layers of clothing (long underwear #1 with a mock turtleneck, long underwear #2 with a regular turtleneck, long underwear #3 with a zipper, and winter jacket). I put on 2 of those layers, made sandwiches for lunch, and collected the assortment of hats, gaitors, gloves, mittens, and goggles that would accompany me to the slopes today.

Slopes, heh. If a hill behind a grocery store that we missed twice while looking for the turn-off counts as "slopes." Ah, midwest skiing at its finest. Or finest within an hour of where I live. My friend and I went skiing today and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves.

As two people used to skiing out West, this experience was fascinating:
We went down every run multiple times.
We went down every run in less than a minute.
We never waited behind more than 5 people at the chairlift.
We were suddenly catapulted into the "expert" skier category.

We did not fall off the chairlift, run into a tree (what tree?), or otherwise do ourselves harm (thus allaying the fears of my friend's wife who will perhaps learn to ski on these gentle slopes).

While the skiing was not challenging, it was plenty fun. I couldn't always feel my fingers, but the sun emerged and kept things sort-of, mostly warm. We made up games to challenge ourselves. We watched the ski patrol folks practice toting people down on a sled. We spent much of the day outside. We lost count of the number of runs we did.

And the clock above the chairlift for the local black diamonds read "11:50" all day long.