spring break: the pre-home portion

Spring Break was a few weeks ago. At the beginning of our spring break, Brian's family came to visit. They also did us the wonderful favor of driving our belongings here in a moving truck (and this nice gesture was after the nice gesture of, together with my parents, packing it up for us!). We got to move into a larger place and finally have our own furniture again. We are loving our new space. I had forgotten just how comfortable our bed is. I think still, weeks later, in a half sleep state every now and then I will say to Brian, "This mattress is just so comfortable!"

After the weekend was over and our visitors had returned home, we finally had a chance to make it back up into the mountains for some skiing, which is always a fun time. The second day we were going to go, it started sprinkling while we were still in town. Partway up the mountain, it turned to snow and the roads were already getting snow-packed. We made the disappointing but oh-so-wise decision not to continue in our little car. However, I called the bus route and found out there would be a bus leaving in 30 minutes; we decided to go anyway, even though by this time it was mid-afternoon. On the mountain, it was snowing, snowing, snowing. Riding the lift we would get covered in snow. They had gotten 8-10" of fresh powder just that day, so skiing was fun and difficult, and the snow was really stinging on the exposed skin of my face. Fun times, though. We got in 3 or 4 runs before the lifts closed. We boarded our return bus. We headed out. The bus driver stopped in the parking lot to wipe off his windshield. And then we were stuck. After 30 minutes and the application of tire chains and even then still being stuck for a while, our driver was able to get us going and down the mountain we went. What is normally a 20-30 minute drive took us 2 hours total (including the time we were stuck). The roads were quite awful. I slept most of the way home, but I did see at least one small car stuck on the side of the road. We were so, so thankful we had not driven. It's likely we would have gotten stuck or at least had a really tough drive home, and our phone does not get service up there. Good thing we are not very good at getting going early in the day because had we left for skiing in the morning, we certainly would have driven and had no idea how terrible things were going to get.

Brian's brother was actually still in town for a conference, so we got to meet up with him in the evenings. One evening we went to his hotel to swim and hot tub. The hotel has a sweet, monstrous hot tub outside, which was torture getting to and getting back to the building (because of the freezing outside temperature), but was so sweet while we were in it. I love outdoor hot tubbing in the winter. It was fun to grab snow from the ground nearby and see how quickly it would melt in the hot water. :) I can't imagine their electric bill, though.