In case you aren't up on your US geography, I had a professional artist work with a professional cartographer to mock up this sophisticated image...just for you!
I love to ski. My wife loves to ski (here's her take on this trip). However, skiing is expensive. And skiing is hard to do with an infant. So it had been a lot of years since we'd skied on a real mountain.
Sure, we'd been to Sugar Mountain in North Carolina, where they might have better runs if they just coated their tiny hill in literal sugar. We'd been to a place in western New York when we lived in Akron, OH. It was OK, but sort of like the top 1/3 of a real ski mountain. Nice, but way too short.
Then in 2016, we finally had money and old enough children, and booked a ski trip to Keystone, CO for spring break. We got to the airport a good 2 hours early, just so there couldn't be any problems. What could go wrong?
The gate agent called us up and said there was a major spring blizzard in the Denver area, but he could get us on a flight to Tampa and from there to Denver a little later in the afternoon. Ok, away to Tampa we went.
The gate agent in Tampa laughed at me when I told him the story about the afternoon Denver flight. "I don't know what the Nashville agent was thinking. Denver's closed. I can send you back to Nashville, or to Denver in a couple of days."
"Couple of days? I need to think that over." I said, incredulously.
"Don't take too long." said the gate agent.
So that's how, once we decided a half hour later to make lemonade of the situation and just split the vacation into Tampa + Keystone, that we ended up on a flight to St. Louis.
The Tampa to Denver flight had filled, and we got the last seats that could even get us to Denver without waiting yet a third day in Tampa.
So we rented a car, found a hotel, and jumped into the swimming pool. We had suitcases full of ski stuff, but also trunks for the hot tub. Then we did some shopping for t-shirts and shorts, and went into panic vacation planning mode. Disney on a day's notice? No thanks. What else oh, great Trip Advisor, exists around Tampa that is fun?
Buch Gardens! We had a fun day impersonating their topiaries...
With no troubles in St. Louis, it was on to Denver. It was a late flight followed by a long drive from the Denver airport to Keystone, so we arrived at the condo at midnight. The rest of our family had been there a couple of days, so they had taken care of the grocery shopping, allowing us to dive right into the powder the next day!
Until at noon, I had a splitting headache as did my older son. It was my first bout with altitude sickness. I couldn't eat lunch and didn't leave the bed, much less return to the slopes. A few hours went by, and I did some research on altitude sickness. Turns out that eating, even if you aren't hungry, can help it. So I fired up some food, and sure enough it worked almost immediately. I tracked down Ryan and made him eat too. We were all good to go for the rest of the trip.
It wasn't what we had in mind, and adding a couple of days of tourism in Tampa to your ski trip bill is a real kick in the wallet. But after most of a decade away from the slopes, we decided after Keystone to try to go back as often as possible. We had remembered how much we love to ski, and were pleased to see both our sons take to it as well.
