A fine weekend with one or two small faults

We start on Saturday, when I didn't post anything. Why? Well, 'cause I was sah-lammed. Got up, drove down to Gasworks with my bike and Dad's bike (the Sekai I'm selling, if you're interested), rode up to Bothell and back (only 30 miles, not the 40 I was supposed to ride), and didn't sell it 'cause the chick who claimed her boyfriend wanted to buy it never returned my call (fault #1). From there it was home, shower, swap out the bike rack for the ski rack, load the car, and head up to lovely Glacier, WA for two days of skiing at Mt. Baker.

Here we come to fault #2: the house we rented. We've rented properties through Mt. Baker Lodging for years. Basically, they provide property services for home owners in the various communities up there, market the houses, handle cleaning and maintenance, etc. Well, the house we rented, Snowline #26, sounded great: 3 bedrooms (we had some friends coming with us), hot tub, game room, no pets allowed, pretty dang perfect. Well, it wasn't.

First off, the big problem: The hot tub didn't work. Well, that's not quite true: technically it worked - it held water, and the water wasn't frozen. But it wasn't hot. 77 degrees is not hot. So we called. They sent out a guy. He did something. It didn't help. Now, I don't know about you, but after a day of skiing I'm sore. And a nice hot hot tub feels dang good. A warm shower is fine, but it's not the same.

The second problem with ol' Snowline #26 was the layout. It's weird. You enter, the hallway makes a "T", you go up two steps to the kitchen on the right, or down another hall to the dining room / living room on the left. There's one bedroom next to the living room, the other two are up stairs...through the kitchen. Weird. And, as with many homes we've rented up there, the lighting was less than ideal.

OK, enough bitching about the lodging. How was the snow, you ask? Well...you saw the picture I texted in yesterday, so you know it was white. And deep. And, in a word, awesome. They had something like 50" last week, so there was plenty of powder. Sunday Paige and the kids hung out on the handle tow at the Heather Meadows "upper lodge", although I did steal Logan away to do a couple runs on one of the chairs (since he's in 5th grade he gets to ski there for free).

The big news of Sunday was that Maya, who has previously had a hate-hate relationship with the skiing thing, had a blast. Logan helped her get a moderate grip on the snowplow / pizza stop, a bit of turning, and a whole bunch of speed. She was in heaven.

Today was even better, with again one fault. The fault? Forgetting to put on sunscreen. Ouch. It wasn't sunny most of the day...in fact, we woke up to several inches of snow down in the lowlands of Glacier (and 5" of new up at the ski area!). But it was sunny enough that without sunscreen my pasty redhead skin got torched, as did the girl's. But enough about that...back to the snow! There were even fewer people up there today, what with it being a Monday and all. The upper lodge was closed, and since the White Salmon handle tow is all of 100 feet long or something, Paige and Maya both bought lift tickets today and spent most of their time on Chair 7 where Logan discovered the joy of skiing through fresh, deep, powdery snow, something we don't really see up at Snoqualmie (there, when the snow is deep it tends to be heavy and stop you short).

So, all in all, in spite of the weird layout, the busted hot tub and the sunburn, a successful ski trip!