Go skiing? Yes, sure, no problem at all! We’ll just head up to Killington and “hit the slopes” as they say around here. Well, it turned out to be a great experience, but not as “smooth” as we initially thought. at least not in the beginning. It was just a year ago when we went with a bunch of friends from Latin America to ski during the Thanksgiving break. Although there were different levels of skiers among us, we all had a blast during four intense days.
We both spent the first day in a skiing class. By the end of the day we were desperate to escape from the group lesson and go skiing on our own. And that’s exactly what we did. Well, almost! We did escape from class, and one of us (J.) did indeed go down the trail skiing. But the other (L.) rapidly realized that going down walking was a better option than going down tasting the snow every 10 seconds. We had enough skiing for the day, and it was about time to go out all together for a big tasty burger.
The next day was much more exciting. The weather was great and we were all prepared to demonstrate our “recently acquired” skiing skills. But most important of all, we started to really enjoy skiing. It is an amazing sensation once you are able to control the skis. You can look around you and enjoy the beautiful landscapes. Not that falling was no longer an issue, but we got more used to it and at least learned how to get up without someone’s help (which was very difficult and frustrating at the beginning). All of us went up and down the slopes several times.
At some point, a friend from Spain who is an experienced skier invited us to go down a Blue slope. We had done only Green ones so far. Lucia preferred working more on her turns before heading down a Blue slope, but I (Jose) went ahead to see what it was like. As I started going down, I was suddenly spending more time on the ground than standing up. As it turned out to be, it was not really a Blue slope, it seemed more like very dark blue. By halfway down, we realized it was a Black one. While my friend went down with no effort whatsoever, I went rolling down more like a snowball. It is not a good idea to go down a Black slope on the second day of skiing in your life!
The third and fourth days went out really well. Lots of skiing, falling and more skiing. After that trip in Thanksgiving, we continued going to Killington quite frequently. This season we are ready to hit the slopes again as soon as the weather allows us. And maybe we’ll get into snowboarding this time, why not?
