So Mom complained to me that Dad owed her a vacation. I nodded and smiled, knowing that Dad considers Mom's idea of a vacation to be about as relaxing as climbing Mount Everest. Dad prefers to get cold and wet while hunting wild game that's had more sleep in the last week than he has. "Sure Mom," I said, wandering off to do other things. The subject was dropped.
A couple of months later, I got a phone call. "Guess what?" Mom said. "Want to go skiing this February?" "Uh, sure," I replied. "Where? And which weekend?" "Vermont," she said. "Bring your friends." I thought of the number of people I consider good friends. "I'll just invite the crowd." This was stalling. I didn't think that many people would fit in my car.
I was, of course, wrong.
Everyone wanted to come. So we piled into my tiny Saturn and drove off across the northern wastelands with five people and no breathing space. I was lucky. Drivers always get leg room. On the other hand, I didn't have a conveniently placed Pikachu to lean on as a pillow, either. We played loud j-pop, big band, 80's, anything to stay awake. "I don't care if the sun don't shine, I get my lovin' in the evenin' time...." New Hampshire is a lot bigger than it looks on the map.
Wow! I mean, I knew I was speeding, but it was incredible how fast we got to exit 12! I turned off and elbowed somebody to give me directions. Most of the backseat was comatose.
"Turn right" someone said, and we started to follow the directions. Except that there weren't any of the other turns that were supposed to be there, and we were driving on 1/2 a foot of snow in a winter wonderland, sparkles falling off the trees all around us. Beautiful. But we were very very lost.
Eventually, we came out the other end of the road and found a gas station, where wiser souls than I discovered that this was the Exit 12 in New Hampshire, not the one in Vermont. Two more hours to go. We stocked up on doritos, french fries, and coke for Miko, and we broke out fresh tapes.
Needless to say, we finally made it. My parents had not arrived yet, so we tried to check in. Ha! Do not ever try to check in without the receipt or the original credit card or anything. I thought they were going to ask for a DNA sample to prove my relationship to Mom.
The people at the skiing place were nicer. We changed in the cubicle of a bathroom with half the human population of the area, and I loaned Sarah several articles of clothing, since I usually pack everything I own for overnight trips. Then we purchased tickets for the low, low price of $75, which is supposedly a great deal for 5 people. No wonder college kids ski at their parents' expense.
Even before we got to the nightmare that was attaching our boots to the skis, there were these little orange trail thingies to be figured out. Sarah did mine. She also basically put my boots into my skis. But others had more trouble than I (that is, they were further back in line for Sarah's services), so it wasn't too embarrassing except when passers-by would snicker, which only happened a few times.
The first 100 yards were the worst. We tried to follow the marked trail, but our skis wandered down the mountainside with minds of their own. Sarah and I were the only ones to remain standing, though bending over and holding onto a little flag marker barely counts as standing. Even Sarah cheated- she clung to a telephone pole. We were a mess.
Helen decided very quickly that it was a nice day for a walk. The rest of us slowly dragged ourselves back to the trail and started learning how to ski. The little tracks on the side helped a lot, but some people accused me of cheating :P
We took several spectacular falls along the way, but we were starting to get the hang of it when we reached this HILL. I mean, not a hill, a HILL. Things looked a lot bigger when we were on skis.
I got halfway up the HILL and turned around to take pictures. Below me, first Kristin, then Miko went down in a pile, and they refused to pop their skis out because it had been so hard to get them on in the first place. Sarah posed for a picture, then began sliding inexorably backward, eventually to land helplessly in the same place as the other two. At this point I, too, was sliding and calmly (yeah right) enlisted the aid of Helen, who held me up while I took bribe pictures of everyone else.
After everyone was mostly out of the way, Helen let go. Looking back on it, I should have realized that I was not immune from the same physical laws that had plastered everyone else. Anyway, I went screaming down the hill (I mean that in several senses of the word) and barely managed to hit the tracks instead of flying off the trail entirely. It turned out to be lots of fun ^_^;
We mostly had it figured out at that point, and we were going back the way we came, so we thought it wouldn't be a problem. Except for the little hill (it was so funny to watch random heads pop over then pop back down) and my spectacular somersault into a face-plant, we made it back in one piece. We decided that was enough skiing for one day.
About one minute after Sarah loudly wondered how we would meet up with my mother, Mom wandered over to where we were taking group photos. Funny thing about timing around me, ne? Mom took the rest of the pictures while Dad hollered for us to hurry up. Ah, it was nice to be back with family.
We ate an early snack then retired to the cabin, which turned out to have almost enough bed space, counting couches. I think Sarah was the other unfortunate. The floor wasn't that hard, though.
But first we had to fix supper and introduce everyone to Caitlin. This took a while, as most people wanted to impress her with their various stuffed animals or offerings of food, and someone had the brilliant idea (sarcasm, sarcasm!) to introduce her to Pikachu, who says "Pikachu!" when you bonk him on the head. Fifteen minutes and 300 "Pikachu"s later (that's a "Pikachu" every 5 seconds, if you wanted to count...), we had supper ready. I think it was the first time many of them had eaten Ranchero Beans. I was surprised. It's a staple at our house.
After supper, we brought out the hot chocolate and goldfish, and played around for a while. Miko fell asleep first, making her the first victim of an "Aw, isn't she so cute sleeping" picture. Helen was the second. I, of course, fell asleep last and woke up last, being an anti-morning person and sleeping on the floor. For my pictoral sins the night before, Kristin decided to repay me in kind and there is now a horrid shot of me sleeping with my hair all messed up and the blanket up over my chin.
We got up, got packed, went through the eternally slow process of having six people use the same bathroom, and packed up the car. Then it was time for more pictures, and showing Caitlin how to make snow angels. Mom came down to see us off, we all waved, we managed to get the doors shut (stuff expands when you repack it, I swear), and turned the key. And turned the key. And turned the key.
Ahem. Car batteries are not supposed to die after a four hour trip the day before, if nothing was on. So we checked. Nothing was on. So I cussed, pulled everything out of the trunk, got out the cables, attached them, and told Mom to go get Dad's keys- or Dad, if she could manage it.
Dad of course seemed to think I needed help jumping off the car (as if I hadn't done it 10 times in the past year with the previous car), but we finally got it running, repacked the trunk, and I climbed back in. The backseat had asphyxiated during this period and now moaned quietly.
We got brekkie and drove on down toward the highway. Along the way, the sun glanced beautifully off the snow and I couldn't see a thing, so Sarah took my glasses and attached the little sunglass covers to them during a hair-raising minute or so down a steep, winding road toward an intersection. But we survived, and sped on down past Ben and Jerry's, which Kristin told us we should stop for, but they didn't open for another hour and nobody else wanted to wait that long. It seems that Kristin and Miko had actually driven up there on their own once, all that way, just to take the factory tour and buy ice cream. Some people....
Some of the tapes had to be replayed along the way. Four hours is a long time. We stopped at that Exit 11 gas station again, got more coke, and took off again. And I mean really took off. Cops are less of a threat than falling asleep at the wheel.
We only made one more wrong turn, at that insane place where 95 and 128 meet, just north of Boston. But I figured it out (with a little help from the peanut gallery), and we made it back just in time for Sarah to leap out of the car, dash off to change clothes, and arrive at rehearsal only slightly out of breath. Whoohoo! I took her stuff downstairs, took my stuff upstairs, promised I'd see everyone for supper, and crashed. Skiing it exhausting work.
So Mom started muttering again last week about how Dad insisted they take the annual week-long vacation to the beach this summer, and was there anyone I wanted to bring along, and I offered to house-sit. It seemed safer.