Board Hard

This is what I looked like, only not asian

 

I fell on my ass alot this weekend.  My ass, my side, my front.  Not on my head though in extra sad recent events, and let it be known, after not-so-tough negotiations, my sister is buying me a helmet for next season (well, I will buy it, she’ll pay me back).  Jeff (as in Apt 2 Jeff) and I went up to Okemo this weekend on one of those Get On The Bus trips (this always makes me think of the Million Man March (not the real march, though, just the Spike Lee version)).  This was through Emilio’s Ski Shop, and what they have you do is you get up before the bars close and you get on the bus at 4:30am and head up to Vermont (you sleep the whole way, though it’s really not comfortable).  You get there right when the place opens, which is great because it’s pretty surreal to be in Vermont at 9:30am when you were watching Siena beat Ohio State in New Jersey 12 hours earlier (so that’s two pretty surreal things).  Then, if it’s the second to last weekend in March, you proceed to fall on your thighs and chest and knees and you slide 16 feet every fall, at least, because the mountain is covered in ice.  At some point my right thigh always stops working.  It just quits.  And so I go down the mountain and try and do these turns but my thigh doesn’t respond and so my board just scrapes across the ice.  I also burned my face off.  It had to’ve been 40+ degrees and really quite gorgeous, beautiful blue skies, nice air, etc. But at some point I’m touching my face and it just feels tender.  So I’m falling and burning and I can’t get off the lift without falling, but I look good because I finally got a snowboarding jacket ($150 bucks at Macy’s, yeah!).  

Saturday was one of those snowboarding days that make you feel like you’ve learned nothing and that you’re not very good.  But at the end of the day, you always get a run in where everything (or at least a few things) click, and you get a glimpse of how to ride on the snow.  You carry that with you more than you carry all the falls.  That’s why I can’t wait to get out again next season.  And I’m pissed the season’s over.

Some other highlights:

Having gloves instead of no gloves.

Eating my quota of Chili in a bread bowl on the mountain.  I think chili just tastes better on a snowy mountain.

Jeff and I drinkin’ a beer after a full day of boarding (falling) before getting on the bus to head home.

Seeing McHale randomly after eating my chili in a bread bowl.  It’s strange to think that I’ve seen him at least one more time this month than his actual roommate, and it was 5 hours away in another state.

Stopping into PC Richards and Son after the bus dropped me off and using their bathroom without them complaining.  Then learning all about HD TV’s from Marc Anthony (very knowledgeable).

Some lowlights:

My gloves were my girlfriend’s (I lost mine). 

Watching Rise on the bus ride home.  Jeff was most disappointed in the editing.  I think he was very upset about the ‘bad cuts’.

Crawling up the mountain on my belly to get my sunglasses that fell off on one of my wipeouts

Inserting  my body into a bus seat for 8 hours in one day

Tags: okemo, pc richard and son, snowboarding