Snowboarding

One time when I was 14, I went snowboarding. My parents got me a snowboard rental, lesson and lift ticket for my birthday. It was pretty cool. My friends were all better than me, also owned their equipment and had parents who would pay for them to go do those things. Between the ages of 8 and 10, I also went skiing a few times with my dad. One time, my mom and dad went to Sugarbush and it scared the hell out of me. Those Vermont mountains are huge! Their blue squares are like 10x black diamonds in Connecticut. When I was 20 or 21, someone took me skiing again. It was fun, but the bindings on the rental skis were really loose and one of the skis kept falling off.

A couple of years ago, back when I had more money to waste on eBay, I bought a snowboard for $86.52. I  think that's a good deal, though Static Snowboards seem to be an unknown quantity. Last year, I bought some snowboard boots, but we got no snow. Also, lift tickets are wicked expensive. I thought maybe I could start hiking up stuff and then snowboarding back down, but using cross country skis to do that is way preferable. So, the snowboard has just been sitting in my basement. Well, that's not entirely true. I took it to Vermont back in January when it was really warm and slushy and I rode it down the hill in Claire's parents' backyard.

I had a feeling that some place must be inexpensive to go snowboarding. I looked up Otis Ridge in Mass and it was cheap during the week, but closed Monday and Tuesday. I looked up Mowhawk and found that you can ski there during the week for four hours for $20 and it's open all week. That's only $5/hour. That's an awesome deal in the world of skiing. Sundown is never cheap, must be its proximity to the Farmington Valley.

Sunday night, I watched this. Monday, I rode up the lift without falling and rode down a green circle and sort of remembered how to connect turns. Then, I went down a couple of bigger green circles. Satisfied with that, I decided to go down the terrifying black diamonds of Connecticut's largest ski area. So, apparently I'm like 35 years late in discovering that snowboarding is fun. I couldn't figure out how to ride moguls and there's definitely a distinct lack of going uphill.

Perhaps I'll try this again next year.