Vail, baby

(View from Eagle's Nest Ridge run at Vail)

Last month we went on our week-long, kind-of-annual snowboarding trip with Ninja Z, Ninja S & hubby, and about a half dozen other friends who joined us for a couple of days here and there. It was a total blast, though I was sore for pretty much the entire trip because I am the weak snowboarding link amongst the group. Bailed pretty hard probably 1/2 a dozen times, had a really sore lower back for a couple of days and a big, fat, black & blue bruise on my butt, but it was worth it :) Good times, good times....

Here's a pic from the night we lost the car in a local parking lot. Picture this: DA, the guy looking up and to his right, screaming at us, "Are you F*!&ing kidding me?! Four of you and none of you knows where you parked the car?!" JL, the guy with the loser sign, is agreeing with him, all the while conveniently forgetting that he was sitting in the front seat of said car while we were parking. Not seen in the pic is the fact that SC was laughing so hard she was literally bent over, legs crossed, trying not to pee her pants. Finally we had to call WC, who answered the phone, "Hi...can't find the car?" The boy is psychic! He knows me waaaaaaay too well :P

DA is also the guy who took some awesome videos of each of us snowboarding. It was so cool! He is probably the best boarder of the bunch of us and he had his camera with the video function and he'd just chase us down the mountain, circle around us, and even film while riding backwards. So now we can all see what we look like when we ride--pretty neat stuff.

We got the whole gamut of weather while we were there. Really sunny, warm days with 50-degree temps, and really cold, windy days with very low double-digit temps. We also got a big snow day that created giant snowballs:

I think next year we're going to try to hit Park City, UT. Ninja Z really just wants to go back to Whistler, but we kinda want to check out this one last major resort before doing that. If Park City isn't good though, it's pretty much Whistler for us from here on out. Vail was pretty good in terms of snow but it felt more like a skier's mountain because there were a lot of long flats to get to different parts of the mountain and into some of the bowls. The good news was that a lot of the flats must have had just the tiniest bit of downhill slope because it wasn't too bad as far as traverses go. Either that or I'm getting better on my board ;)