Good old fashioned Giddy Fun

And so I went to Liberty Mountain in Pennsylvania, for a taste of the skiing lifestyle and all that goes with it, lodges, hot chocolate, athletic looking moms in snowsuits (oh, wait, my mind was wandering there a second)...

In truth, I pretty much suck as a skiier. My body seems to want to hurtle out into space, legs akimbo, instead of staying on terra firma as God intended it to. So many of my skiing experiences, such as they are, have been either of the "bunny slope" variety or else resulting in me ending up in a painful twisted pile under a tree somewhere. I don't mind. The entire package is so much fun that it's hard to have a bad time.

Still, we opted for tubing, since that requires little skill and generally, just weight and momentum. That is something (he says, patting his tum-tum) that I can provide. My charges vanished upon arrival, leaving me to tube away with other abandoned folks.. I found myself enjoying the experience tremendously... launching out into space with an inner tube to land on, propelling me down the hill, was an experience not to be missed. I had an mp3 gizmo with me, and listened to Bob Marley's greatest hits ("Anthology") as the little tow rope gizmo hauled us back up the slope.. there's something about the general sillyness of the activity, combined to listening to "Lively Up Yourself" whilst being towed up a mountain that just made my sense of glee grow exponentially. The attendents probably thought I was some form of snow tubing escaped mental patient. The biting air, the blowing (real, not artificial) snow, it all conspired to liven my spirits tremendously. Winter does that to me, and I have sorely missed snowfall this year.

I can recommend this Liberty Mountain highly-- the facilities were excellent, the staff very efficient (albeit, perhaps a tad overzealous about checking passes on a weekday with no crowd, but that is no matter). Alas, I left the camera at the lower lodge, so no pictures for this one, except the webcam link to give you an idea of what the setting was like.

http://www.skiliberty.com/webcams/Tubing1.jpg

Fate was on my side. The last run of the day featured me making a spectacular face-plant right into one of those barrier berms there, overbalancing and being ungraciously dumped down the hill after my tube. And the webcam failed to record it.

I hope to go back before the season ends and try my hand at real, actual skiing at some point..