I have to say that renting my skis was a much more simple task in America, except the guy asked me if I wanted shorter or longer skis (both of which would work fine for my height) and I didn't know what to tell him. All my experience skiing up til then had been in Germany and Switzerland where neither renter nor rentee were fluent enough in each others languages to have such discussions. I always provided information to the best of my ability in metric and took whatever equipment was given to me and made it work. I have to say, I think up until last night my skis have been too long. I used 136 skis which felt funny at first, but I had such great control and absolutely no problems trying to turn them.
The runs were quite a bit shorter than I had done before and I have to tell you it's kind of nice to go down a hill that's not quite as steep as the Alps. I didn't fall down a single time! The weather was a bit miserable, but not enough to ruin the experience. It snowed the entire five hours we were there. We would take one run and by the time we got back to the top or tracks had been filled in with fresh powder. The up side- fresh powder (who knew how nice it is to ski in); the down side-being soaked through after an hour and slowing down so much that the last bit is always pushing along. Visibility was no worse than other days I've been out and the snow makes pretty colors with the 'night ski' lights on the slopes.
Ending the evening in dry clothes in the lodge after a few hours play on the slopes is icing on the cake :D I will be satisfied if that's all the skiing for this year, but hope that another opportunity comes along in the next few weeks!
Me, Shana, and Gavin on the ski lift only an hour into the evening. Imagine how much more snow we collected ;)
