Jack’s first snowboarding trip 1/23/10

Jack has been dying to try snowboarding so Missy and I finally took him a couple of weeks ago. I wanted to try it too so we decided to rent snowboards but take our skis just in case. I tried to learn as much as I could about it by watching several “how to” videos on the Internet and it looked pretty easy. We got there and everything went very smoothly. It was a warm Sunday afternoon and it was not crowded at all. Missy loved it because the temp. was about 45 degrees so we didn’t get cold at all. The first thing I noticed was that the boots were VERY comfortable. Much better than ski boots. We could walk in them very easily and they just felt comfortable. Jack was pretty excited to finally get a chance to go snowboarding and we took a bunch of pictures with us and our boards. We walked over to the “kiddie park” and put our feet in our boards. That was the easy part! Jack did pretty good, but man was that hard!!! It is just such an un-natural feeling and the hard part is that when you start to lose your balance, you can’t move your feet to correct yourself. They are locked in the bindings so all you can do is fall and we did plenty of that! One thing I remembered from the videos I watched is that they want you to learn how to do it with one foot in and one foot out before you put both feet in, so we did that for a while and that really helped. I could easily make it down the hill with one foot out so I could catch my balance when I started to fall. Jack did much better too, but it was still very hard. We did that for a couple of hours and we both were starting to get a little better and make it down the hill without falling so I decided to shoot some video of Jack. I stayed at the top of the hill and let Jack go down first. He made it all the way down and fell at the bottom by the people waiting in line to get on the moving sidewalk. He just lay there, face first for a while, so we figured he was just tired. But then we saw a guy come over to him and help get his feet out of his bindings, so we knew he was in pain and we rushed down to help him. He was crying and still in pain. Apparently when he fell, he twisted his back leg and couldn’t untwist it himself so we thanked that guy for coming over to help him. He was fine, but it kind’of shook him and Missy up a bit, and he said he wanted to go get his skis! I wanted to try do it some more and try to learn how to do it, so I kept my snowboard and went to get Jack’s skis. Once he got those, he was ready to hit the big slopes and go fast like he always does. So we went over to the far left slope and skied there for a while. Missy and Jack were doing great and skiing down quickly, but I could not for the life of me, keep up with them. For some reason, I could not freekin turn left! I think it was because I only had one foot in the bindings and couldn’t get enough of an edge, but that slope curves right the whole time so no matter what I tried to do, I just kept sliding to the right and could not go straight! I’d have to walk up the hill and get to the right side about 4-5 times before I could get down the hill. I was getting VERY frustrated and VERY tired so after about 4 hours, I finally decided to turn in my board before I killed myself. I was getting to the point of exhaustion and I knew I’d end up hurting myself if I didn’t quit soon.

We had a great time and it was a great day of skiing, but I have a newfound respect for snowboarders. It looks so cool and easy when you see those guys sliding back and forth across the hill, but man, that must take a ton of practice to get that good. When you’re 40 years old and only go 2-3 times per year, it’s really hard to learn how to do it. I think Jack was pretty disappointed too. He still wants to learn how to do it so I think I’m going to buy us each a used snowboard at the next Paoli Swap Shop so we can learn without breaking the bank. With rentals and lift tickets for all 3 of us, it ended up costing $200 for our trip and we really can’t do that very often. If we had our own boards, Jack and I could go for about $70. Hopefully I can find a couple of decent used boards so we can try it again next year!