Stow Aways: Ski Vermont!

That license plate is hard to get use to after Ski Utah for most of our lives.

Well, we arrived at Smuggler's Notch, VT on Monday night for our first family vacation ever that doesn't involve visiting relatives. David and I haven't done any skiing in over 10 years. We decided it was time to try it again and teach Grace.

Smuggler's is a fantasy place for families. It is seriously fun. Our little condo is right in the center of the village about 1 minute walking to anything we want to do. In fact, we can ski right to our building. We enrolled Grace in a week-long ski camp and Harriet in a week-long, well, day care. They call it Treasures, and actually it's really nice and they do a very good job, but it is still day care.

Monday was a tough day as we scurried to finish packing, take the dogs to the Doty's house, rent skis from REI and then make the 4 hour drive with the screaming and fighting kids to northern VT. As David says, there's little between here and the arctic and once you've felt the wind at the top of the peak, you're quite sure that Santa's neighborhood isn't far.

Tuesday, we dropped Hattie off and we all started skiing. David and I were a bit nervous and took a cautious day going down the bunny slope to make sure we weren't going to kill ourselves. Grace had a rough day too because the skis REI fitted her with were way too long and she had a hard time keeping up with the class. Still, we were all pretty happy at the end of the day after skiing, got Grace some new skis, and looked forward to a better day on Wednesday.

In the middle of the night, Grace woke up feeling sick with a fever. We couldn't believe our luck that she would get sick on the second night here, but I pretty much had planned on someone getting sick. She woke up Wednesday excited to ski. After a phone call to her doctor who said that if Grace felt like skiing that we should let her ski and she probably wasn't too sick. So we dropped her off at camp and took Hattie up the hill to Treasures. It proved to be a long day for Hattie. She had to stay in the day care for 7 hours (you can't pick them up and take them back) while David and I took ski lessons and then went to a mandatory condo sales pitch (mandatory if you want your $700 discount!)

David and I had great ski lessons (on separate mountains!) and now are pretty confident that we can get back out on the slopes and really enjoy ourselves. Our knees and egos are holding up so far.

We went to pick up Grace who looked like she wanted to lay down and sleep for 100 years. Her eyes were both red little slits and she just looked terrible. Her fever was pretty much gone so we took her back to the room for a good nap hoping that it was just a long day for her. Her instructor said that she had a great day skiing until the last run which ended up being one run too many and she melted down.

Long story short, David just took her for a 30 minute drive to the nearest emergency room. She is really really really sick today. I feel so bad for her. She was so looking forward to learning how to ski and we were looking forward to the end of the week when we could take her out with us and ski with her. Now things aren't looking so good. It should be apparent that if you have time to blog on a vacation, the vacation is not going well!

We have taken only a very few pictures and are now starting to regret we don't have any of Grace skiing or even outside in the snow. We might not get any now. If you're reading this, say a big prayer and cross your fingers for us that we can get Grace better in time for her to do some more skiing before we have to leave.

Here are a few snapshots. See, we could have just posted these and made you all think that we're having a lovely yuppie ski vacation.