Winter fun in New Hampshire's White Mountains

We decided to take advantage of Greg's school's January vacation. In case you weren't aware, Greg attends MIT, where it seems it's all about the hype. What kind of a school gives almost a month off right after Christmas??? Can't say I'm complaining, though! We decided to head up to Waterville Valley, NH to see if these Fennells could find some nordic and alpine adventure! The littlest Fennell did a pretty good job of partying it up. This photo below was taken shortly after Kai inhaled an adult sized portion of Mac n' Cheese served up at a posh restaurant.

He also thought this shelf of toddler-accessible chocolate bars in the Waterville general store was the bomb!

I haven't skied in the Eastern part of the continent in 16 years. These kinds of numbers still blow my mind. I looked at my ski poles the other day during my 30 minute wait in the cold for the mountain shuttle bus and realized that I had owned these particular trusty pink poles for about 22 years...count 'em....twenty-two! That is a very long time, which means that they are some very well made poles and that I have been inhabiting this planet for quite some time now! But I digress, back to our ski trip.

My memories of Eastern skiing are of very, very cold days, very, very icy mountains, and to be honest, not that much snow. But we lucked out pretty well. We got hit with the storm that covered much of the Eastern part of North America with snow and ice on Wednesday. We got the snow part :-). I wouldn't exactly call what we skied and boarded on POW, but it was pretty good, especially by Eastern standards. But it was still miserably cold. Some things never change. 

Waterville Valley has some exceptional cross country ski terrain. I got out on Tuesday for a few hours of solo skate skiing. And I really mean solo. I didn't see another single living being during my entire time skiing on the mountain. And I was skiing on the mountain. The ski trails basically went up and up and up til I eventually turned round and came down, down, down. Today we decided to try nordic skiing for the first time as as family. This meant that I got to pull Kai in a little device called a "pulk." Its kinda like a sled with a plastic zipper-on cover that attaches to the skier's waist by two long metal sticks. We were all a little unsure about the pulk, Kai in particular. However, once his little sled got moving the complaints stopped and the little man enjoyed his one-mommy dogsled team. Whenever I stopped to gasp for air and take a swill of my water bottle a little voice from behind demanded "go, go, go!" I knew he was truly enjoying himself when I looked back to see "New Bunny" (the aptly named latest addition to Kai's bunny family), being "hopped" all over the inside of the pulk. Kai and I were both very proud of Greg today. He opted to rent a pair of classic style skis, figuring that those would enable him to cover a little more ground a little more safely than the skating variety. And cover ground he did! I have to stay I don't think I saw any renditions of "splatted spider" at all on the Waterville trails today. So, overall the family skiing experiment/adventure was a success and we'll be buying the ski attachment for our Chariot bike trailer so we can get out more as a family.

The apres-ski scene in Waterville was a little quiet. We think that there were probably about 5 other people staying there this week. No kidding; it almost had a creepy, ghost town kind of feeling. Seeing as we live in population density central, we really enjoyed it - after we got over being weirded out. We had the pool, the restaurants, the trails, and the rec center gym all to ourselves! I'm not sure what Kai's trip highlights would be if he could blog, but I think it might have been that bowl of macaroni! As for me, it was the constant heat in our little condo. When we arrived home this evening, our house was a toasty 49 degrees F (Greg is insisting that I have to start talking fahrenheit).