Snowboarding!

Since Grant discovered snowboarding on the Wii, he's wanted to do the real thing. Yesterday we stopped off at Winterplace in Flattop WV, a 75 minute drive from the house and conveniently on the way to my folk's in Pittsburgh where we were headed anyway. I foolishly thought we'd arrive at 9:30, get geared up and hit a 10:00 lesson. Little did I know that EVERYONE else seemed to have that same plan. With one solitary cashier, it took over an hour just to get our equipment and find out way around. We also discovered we needed to buy ski goggles and fortunately I also bought us each a pair of toe and hand warmers. The temperature was in the teens and I didn't want us to be cold and miserable. (It turned out we were perfectly comfortable!)

We missed the 11 am lesson so grabbed an early lunch then headed out for the 12:00 noon group. We had a great teacher, Austin, and were paired up with another mom-son duo. We headed to the bunny slope and learned to glide, skate, then finally snowboard. Or at least our best imitation of snowboarding. That slope had a "magic carpet" lift that is essentially a rubber moving sidewalk that carries you back to the top. Eventually we graduated to the chair lift and tried a few other slopes.

Grant did a great job and was game without being reckless. He absolutely loved it and is already bugging me about when he can go back. I enjoyed it, but it's a lot of effort just to get to the slopes. I'll take running. The shoes go on and off you go! We'll see what we can do to satisfy Grant's need.

The "magic carpet" lift.

This was taken when the moms bailed and let the instructor (red hood) take the two boys down a slightly steeper slope. Pretty comical!!