Valentine's ski trip!

So we decided to celebrate Giana's 4th birthday by traveling up north to Flagstaff. The kids have been wanting to go "play in the snow" and we wanted to see if they might be big enough to try skiing this year. I made some calls to Arizona Snowbowl and enrolled them in Skiwee school (for ages 4-7). It was just slightly more for a full-day lesson versus a half-day so I signed them up for the full-day and hoped that Giana would do OK without her daily nap. The instructor on the phone was pretty firm about dropping the kids off quickly and NOT interfering with the lesson so it was shaping up like Amy & I would be able to ski ALONE also. I quickly decided to call this our Valentine's Ski Date and kill 2 birds with 1 trip to Snowbowl :)

It couldn't have been easier. We arrived and checked in, dropped the kids off, bought our lift tickets and just like that we were on the lift for our first run of the day... We couldn't believe how empty the mountain was on a Friday and it being a holiday weekend also. There was NO ONE on the mountain.

After about 6 or 7 runs, we stopped for lunch and thought we *might* get a glimpse of the kids from the deck of the lodge taking their lunch break but no such luck. We hoped they were doing well (and since neither of our cell phones had rung, we assumed all was well).

After lunch the lines got bigger as the afternoon half-day crowd started arriving. We still managed a dozen or so runs for the day and the slopes had hardly anyone on them.
As 3PM approached we decided to take Boo Boo Trail over towards Heart Prarie to meet up with the kids' class. As luck would have it, we skied up on Giana's class on their last run of the day. We couldn't believe how well these Skiwees were doing!
She was focused on her instructors and pretty proud of herself. We followed them back down to the lodge and Aran's class was already finished. We took them both back out for a couple runs with us and they did fabulously! Here are a few unedited videos of our runs with them.



Aran skiing on Heart Prarie and catching up to Giana and me.


Giana just liked to point her skis downhill! Next time we'll work on turns! :)


Aran skiing on Bambi and going through some trees.

As you can see, it was really busy on the bunny hill too - NOT!

It was an awesome day on the mountain and Amy & I agreed that we will be doing this again for sure. (And now Aran says he doesn't want to cross-country ski anymore - D'oh!)

We're not sure when our next opportunity will be....but we are ready!!!



It was a great way to kickoff Giana's birthday weekend! The rest of the weekend was memorable as well - and now our baby is 4! Where does the time go...