Christmas Miles 0 - 144: To Seven Springs and Back

As I mentioned previously, we did a lot of driving over the Christmas.  I've decided to chronicle those adventures by tracing our miles to recap our travels (and I promise I'll finish with the Hartman brother wedding recaps soon after.)

Our holiday started on Wednesday, December 23rd, when we traveled to 7 Springs for an overnight ski trip.  Dave had already planned a January one-day trip with his brothers, but part of the fun of skiing for me is staying in the lodge, but trying to coordinate that with a group of people has proven to be a pain in the ass, so we decided to do our own little get away.  We took advantage of the last day of their pre-season rates, and got an amazing deal on an overnight package.

We upgraded to a king bed, slopeside room and this was the view we got when we arrived.

Totally awesome

Lift tickets for skiing that night were included in our package, but we decided to skip the night skiing and rest up for the next day.  "Resting up" meant having a nice big dinner and quite a few drinks before calling it a night.

We watched skiers and "drank" everytime one fell.  Sadly, most people who do night skiing are pretty good, so even though we were looking exclusively at black diamond slopes, we saw very few falls.

The view of the main lodge when out on the balcony

We rearranged our room to provide ourselves with viewing comfort

It was also during this trip that Dave decided to start growing a beard.  Here is a picture of Day 1. You will see subsequent days in the upcoming posts.

The next morning we rose early for our free breakfast, and we realized that preparing for skiing is quite a time investment.  Since we didn't ski the night before, we still had to rent out skis that morning.  And, since it was already 9 a.m. by the time we were done with breakfast - and since we had to be out of the hotel by 11 - we needed to basically get completely dressed and pack the car to check out before skiing.  So, we didn't actually get to hit the slopes until 10 a.m., but all of the time investment was worth it because it was PERFECT skiing weather.

On the lift

Blue skies, plenty of snow, and temperatures that were just below freezing, which meant no snow making! (I HATE skiing during snow making...)  There were almost no skiers there, probably since most people were still at work, and nearly every slope and lift was open, which meant absolutely no lines at the lifts, and no pile-ups at the intersections of slopes.

Sidenote: When Dave whipped out my cell phone to take the picture you see above, I was scared to death that it was going to be the end of my new Droid.  Fortunately, that was not the case.

We skied until about 3:30, which was way earlier than we had planned on leaving, but we had both skied so much and so hard (given the ideal conditions) that we were absolutely exhausted, and we both felt like we had gotten more than our money's worth out of the experience, so it was well worth it.

A daytime shot from the balcony

Up next: Christmas Eve party at our house!