Vacation... all I ever wanted...

This past weekend my family spent time in Vail. It was a much needed vacation for the 4 of us. We had a wonderful time!

Our trip started out with a little bit of humor when we went to pick up our rental car in Denver. My parents went in to get our car and they upgraded us to a new suburban... we packed up all of our luggage [snowboards, skis, 2 bootbags, & 4 carry on pieces of luggage] and went to head out of the gate when the guy told us that we had the wrong car.. how in the world could that happen? well, apparently we were supposed to get in the car [which they have all the keys in the cars] to the left of the one we got into... so we had to UNPACK the entire car, REPACK the new car and try again... only us! Word to the wise silver and taupe look very similar when its dark out and you are supposed to pick out your car! [don't mind the fact that we were supposed to grab the car in slot A16 instead of A17... we were just excited to be on vacation!]

When we got to our condo we were beyond impressed! It was gorgeous and the view of the town was awesome... but not as awesome as our pet/mascot of the week that we affectionately called Gerald but Jerry for short
[this thing is was HUGE!]
We hadn't seen the view from our room because we got there so late but this is what we woke up to in the morning

It was nice to go back to a resort that we have been to before so we aren't relearning our way around the mountain. We hit the slopes early on Friday morning and by Friday afternoon we finally had blue skies


We came back after boarding for about 7 hours to have a relaxing drink on our patio... and I may have been a little mean and sent J this picture and said - Happy Hour?!


Saturday a family friend who lives about a 1/2 hour a away from Vail came to meet us for the day. The conditions on the slopes were HORRIBLE! they closed the back bowls because there was 65 mph winds... and visibility was very low. We decided to ski/board the trees a majority of the time so we could see where we were going... the trees made it challenging but fun!

I realized the only thing worse than nearly crashing into a tree is to nearly crash into a tree, and have all the snow from the bottom branches fall on top of you AND THEN have someone call you out - "hey girl in the blue jacket, are you okay...", "yes sir".... i had to talk myself into getting my feet which were above my head and un-bury myself from the snow so i didn't look like a fool under neath all of this snow!

I also decided to put my pedometer on because I realized that reaching 7,000 steps a day was not going to be easy unless I could get some of my steps in on the mountain... sure enough it worked!

I will take the horrible conditions on Saturday any day to wake up to what we did on Sunday morning... we had 13" of fresh powder and we headed over to Blue Sky Basin. It was a little bit of a struggle to get over there, but once we were there it was pure heaven! I looked at my dad and told him I felt like I was in a big kid's playground!

There was a little hut outside at Blue Sky Basin where you could get hot dogs and drinks - and let me tell you - it was one of the best hot dogs I have ever had.. I had the Denver dog - with chili, cheese, onions, and jalapeno.
Monday we boarded/skied 1/2 of a day before we had to head out. The 4 of us on our last day of vacation [I wish the sky was not so gray... but that's mother nature for you!]
last view from our room...[where were these blue skies when we took our family picture?!]
Thank you mom and dad for another wonderful family vacation! I don't think you realize how much I appreciate that you still take us on vacations and that we all can do something together such as snowboarding/skiing and have so much fun!

Can't wait to do it all over again in New York!