SomeFrills

Oh, look, it’s been another…month almost. At the rate I update this thing, you’d be better off watching grass grow. But I have been on adventures! They just require photo-editing, and when you work a computer-based job 40 hours a week, you’re just a lot less interested in doing more of the same in your off time. I suppose it’s time to prioritize and see where this ends up on the list. My eyeballs would like to respectfully request that SLEEP be near the top of that priority list since caffeine doesn’t do much for them. I’d say they’re whiny, but they’ve got a valid point.

But in lieu of sleep, I have been jaunting about and my most recent expedition was Vermont! Killington, Vermont to be exact. Yes, the Killington of skiing fame, home of the “Beat of the East” and gorgeous steep mountains that take your breath away. And windy side roads with poorly marked speed limits where 50 mph suddenly drops to 30 mph, and a girl can get her first ticket ever doing 63 in a 45 which was once a 55. So I’m also spending some time researching interstate parity of license points instead of blogging.

Regardless, Vermont, I still like you. You’ve got dirty, slushy roads, and cars that come with a fine veneer of salt. Your bars are populated with all sorts of people ranging from the hipsters to the extended families with grandkids/parents, and there is so much old money-new money-just enough for the weekend that socioeconomically you’re even more stratified than the rock formations people ski down.

And, ironically enough, I didn’t ski down any of them. Yes, I drove 4.5 hours each way to spend half a day in Vermont visiting an old friend from middle school. Instead, I tried cross-country skiing for economic (fiscal, physical, and time) reasons. It was $30 for a half-day rental and pass; we got 8km in. You can’t argue a bargain like that.

For those who’ve never cross-country skied before: picture getting on the elliptical at the gym as a rough guide for your posture, now lean forward pretending you’re Igor, and push! There may be some gliding, like say the Hunchback of Notre Dame through a secluded forest path, or, if you go across a giant frozen pond in high winds, you can pretend you;re a penguin crossing the Antarctic on a long trudge towards…whatever it is penguins trudge towards with their giant flipper feet. It was only through sheer force of will that I didn’t make any Donner party cracks, that and some very nice lady from my friend’s timeshare cabin was with us. Hypothermia, frostbite, and cannibalism exactly fun topics.

Cross-country skiing, on the other hand, is. If you’ve skied before it’s pretty easy to pick up, once you get over the awkward posture changes, and you get to see significantly more of the scenery than when you’re barreling down the side of a mountain trying not to collide into anything or anyone. Here, you’re mostly wondering when the trail will slope DOWN, and you can stop skiing uphill.

Hikers also use the same cross-country trails, and they have the distinct advantage of being able to walk UP the slopes and not herringboning awkwardly with your skis splayed out as you hobble up the incline. I think snowshoeing would be a lot of fun; I just wish I’d come to that conclusion earlier when it was snowing every week in NJ. But that’s all right, there’s always dashing back up to argue that speeding ticket and getting some time in the mountains out of it!

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