Last weekend was another first for Mike and I in our new home in California: snowboarding at Big Bear Mountain. We joined the snowboarding experts and our good friends, Kat and Martin, for a winter wonderland weekend that promised to be.....well, an adventure. We hit the road and after a couple hours got to the mountain and had to put the snow chains on our tires. Apparently, this was a HUGE weekend for snow up there- 4 feet in about 4 or 5 days!
The trek up the mountain was nerve-wracking. Mike stayed cool and didn’t seem to care that people were stuck or skidded out on either side of us. We chugged along. I texted Kathleen, who was behind us by about 15 minutes “This is such an adventure!”......then we got stuck. We somehow skidded out because the people in front of us stopped (you can’t do that going straight up a mountain!) and our back tires just could not get out of the snow. Luckily, Martin/Kat saw us and stopped to help. As did some other poor souls stranded like us. Thanks to them, and Mike’s tireless efforts, we got out and victoriously made our way to our house. Martin and Mike called their inner manual laborers and worked hard to shovel our drive way. We were in our cute little cottage and ready to get settled in!
The house was quaint and cute- but the owners clearly had a crazy fetish with bears. They were everywhere! I get it, “Big Bear”...but come on, it was nuts.
After a good dinner and couple drinks, we hit the hay. Not far into the early morning hours, we heard an alarm. We didn’t smell smoke. Martin investigated and realized it was the carbon monoxide alarm going off. Great. The silent killer. Not the way we want to start our weekend! We took the batteries out and plugged it back in and it didn’t go off again. Still, I couldn’t help but image that my chest was feeling tight and my breathing was out of rhythm. When morning broke, we realized we made it through the night, sans carbon monoxide poising.
Putting our somewhat rocky night behind us- we were ready to hit the slopes. It was gorgeous! I loved the trees covered with snow! I was going to drag Mike to a snowboard lesson with me but it didn’t start until later that afternoon. We decided to just go for it; keep in mind I had NEVER snowboarded before in my life. It was rough. I fell get off the lift as I was getting off and almost got hit in the head by the chair, it took me about 45 minutes to get down the bunny slope and I did that basically in a crab crawl because I couldn’t get up. After my lesson it was much better! Mike was really pretty good at “shredding” down the mountain and I think this may become yet another sports hobby of his.
After some soaking in the hot tub, and delicious dinner made by Kathleen (that only took 2.5 hours to make!) and some wine we put our tired and sore bodies to bed.
So despite some adventures, we made it through our first snowboarding weekend and had an amazing time. We definitely had a good time laughing at some of the mishaps, but that’s what makes life interesting :)
