Michelle and I had a nice weekend up north. We left MKE around 6:30 on Friday night to head up to Eagle River. We stayed at Mom & Dad’s house, and then left for Indianhead to go skiing the next morning. We almost considered a couple other hills, because we realized kind of late that there was no night skiing at Indianhead. We were glad we still went for the 12-4 afternoon.
Granted, I still have enough fingers to count the total number of times I’ve been downhill skiing EVER, but these were definitely the best conditions I’ve seen yet; there was fresh powder from the night before, and it snowed most of the afternoon, so all the runs were in great shape. Indianhead is pretty big, as Northwoods skiing goes, and so there was plenty of variety. It was cool to take some runs that lasted more than a minute, too.
At one point, we made our way over to the pair of double-black runs. Michelle tried to explain to me that a good way to control your speed on this one would be to make wide, criss-crossing turns on the way down. That might have worked if there wasn’t 3 inches of fresh new snow on the top. Neither one of us had a successful run down that one; we might as well have just popped our skis off at the top, thrown them down, and went summersaulting after. Later at dinner, I told Michelle that when she wiped out, it was like when Charlie Brown gets knocked out of his clothes by a screaming line drive.
We ended up staying in Ironwood, but drove back to the resort for dinner. Very nice and not very expensive at all. We enjoyed perusing the placemats, which were laminated 60s-era brochures from the hill. Funny to think about (a) riding up to Ironwood by train, and (b) paying $4 a day for renting wooden skis.
The only bad part of the weekend is that I was feeling pretty sick by Sunday. We made more than one stop trying to find a combination of meds that was going to work for me. Ended up getting some decongestant that works pretty well, but Michelle did all the driving home on Sunday, and I stayed home from work today anyway.
If you’re off work today, enjoy the Presidents’ Day! And if you’re not, then remember you had off for MLK Day last month. Err, wait you didn’t..?