Murphy's Law Makes An Appearance in Winter Park

Last weekend was the 2010 Nature Valley NASTAR Nationals in Winter Park, CO.

If you've been reading my blog for awhile, you might remember the trip that my mom and I took to Whistler last March which didn't quite go as planned. This trip was no different. Evidentally my mom and I should not go on trips without other family members.

The weekend started on Thursday when my mom arrived in Denver- 3 hours late. After having boarded the plane in Omaha, it was apparently decided that they should fix the plane's wing before taking off. At first they were told that it would be a 20-minute fix, but it took a lot longer. I was almost in Denver when I was informed that her plane had yet to leave the ground. So, I went on a search for a Wendy's. Certainly a town the size of Denver has several Wendy's locations at which I could get my Jr. Bacon Cheeseburger fix. I never did find a Wendy's. Or a McDonald's. I did take an exit saying "Exit now for Wendy's"... but I never did find the Wendy's. Since my mom's plane still had not left, I killed some time at the mall, discovered the amazingness of Strawberry Julius's, and located both a Target and a Best Buy (these locations come in later in the story). However, simply driving on the interstate to said mall just could not be a boring activity. An impatient car in the lane next to mine decided that he would cut in front of me, and while I managed to avoid hitting him, he wasn't so lucky in avoiding the cars in front of him.
After my little adventure to the mall, I drove uneventfully to the airport and picked my mom up who was waiting at the curb. Then came the Best Buy stop where I was informed that the hard-drive in my 1 1/2 year old laptop was dying, so I was laptop-less for the weekend as the hard-drive from my old laptop was being transferred onto a new laptop. Aside from that, we got out of Denver uneventfully. We got off at a town that I don't remember the name of, so my mom could get dinner. All I got was a soda and half of her fries because I was planning on eating dinner when we got to Winter Park because competitors got a free meal that night. I then proceeded to get on the interstate going east instead of west, but we got off at the next exit, saw some buffalo, and got back on the interstate going west, so it wasn't a huge deal. Life was starting to look up.
Our luck quickly ended at the short little tunnel east of Idaho Springs when traffic came to a standstill for 2 hours due to an accident. There was a sign saying traffic was being directed onto Frontage Road and 511 said the same thing, but neither my mom nor I could understand how it was taking so incredibly long for traffic to exit the interstate and get on Frontage Road. I remembered hearing about a pizza place in Idaho Springs called Beau Jo's which is supposed to be really good. We never did find said pizza place. Finally we got to Winter Park at 8pm. My free dinner had ended at 7, so I was in the mood to find food, but first I had to check-in for the next day's race. Due to my "excellent" directional skills, my mom and I went up the Village Cabriolet, which was essentially an open-air gondola car, walked around the Winter Park base area, and then my mom finally insisted on asking for directions. Turns out that the hotel that was at the bottom of the hill, where we had first loaded the cabriolet was where we needed to check in. My mom was less than pleased about the little adventure. We took the cabriolet down the hill and checked-in for the race and then checked-in to our hotel that was "across the street" from Winter Park Resort. Well, it was across the street- street being major highway. There was a bus though that ran continuously, so all was good. By now it was like 9pm and we were both tired, but I still felt that I needed food, so we drove into the town of Winter Park and right about the time I thought I'd somehow missed the town, we found it and just stopped at the first place we found. It was sometime around 10:30 when we made it back to our hotel room and could finally go to bed.

Friday morning we went to the hotel restaurant with its' over-priced breakfast buffet, got ready to go skiing, and got on the chairlift at 9:15 when my race started at 9:30. So much for slipping the course that morning I guess. I took my first run through the course, went back up the chairlift, and sat at the top of the course waiting for my turn. Since there were 40 snowboarders continuously cycling through in order to complete their two runs, one would think that it wouldn't take that long. Had someone not crashed into the timing device at the bottom which apparently caused the whole system to go haywire and stop recording times, it wouldn't have taken long. So, without knowing what was taking so long, we all sat there, and sat there some more, then it started snowing, and we sat there and sat there and sat there. Then a couple guys went, an ex-Olympian ski racer ran the course (because comparing apples to bananas really equals the playing field), and things finally started moving again. After eating at Snoasis, which turned out to be the most reasonably-priced place on the mountain, my mom and I took a couple of runs, on our quest to ride every chairlift on the mountain since it would have been impossible to ski every trail.
After having made a good start at our goal, we went back to the hotel for a couple hours before heading back to the base area for some prize give-aways. Since the bus that had taken us to the mountain that morning stopped running at 5:30, we drove over and proceeded to get lost while trying to find a place to park. Once we finally found a place to park, I demonstrated exactly how not to descend an icy, snow-covered slope and my mom and I concluded that we should wear snowpants the next day in order to descend such slope. After the prize give-aways, we climbed up such hill on our hands and knees because that was the only way to get up the hill. Then, because my wrist hurt, we went and ate dinner at the hotel instead of in town as we had originally planned to. Around 11pm that night, an annoying beeping noise traveled down the hallway. It sounded vaguely like a fire alarm so I woke my mom up.
The conversation went something like this:
Me: "Mom, is that the fire alarm going off?"
Mom: "Mhm." *Rolls over and goes back to sleep
Me: *Wake Mom up* "Does that mean we should go outside?"
Mom: "Yes." *Rolls over*
Me: "Mom. Wake up!"
Mom: "Why?"
Me: "Because the fire alarm is going off and you just said we should go outside."
Mom: "Oh."
So, some hotel guests, like my mom and I, went outside in various stages of appropriate outdoor-wear. Some guests were smarter and stood in the glassed-in stairwell. When they let us go back inside we were informed that someone set the alarm system off while trying to iron their clothes. I sort of felt like I was in the dorms at that point, because someone not knowing how to iron without setting off the alarm made me think of the people that try to cook and end up setting off the alarm.

Saturday my mom and I met a woman at breakfast who had injured both her shoulder and her knee ski racing the day before. I then managed to end up at my race course even later than the day before and again we stood around some more, waiting for snow to accumulate on the course. However, Saturday's wait was much less time consuming than Friday's was. Afterwards, we went down to the clinic to get my wrist looked at for my parking lot fall the day before. One of the questions on the "Slip and Fall" sheet was "Were you wearing a helmet at the time of your fall?" which I found to be amusing, as you cannot really expect your guests to be wearing a helmet in order to walk through your parking lot at 5:30PM. Then I hung out in the hotel room while my mom went and skied some more. That evening was the awards ceremony- I got 3rd for Female 17-20 snowboarding- and then they had an awards banquet thing for competitors and autograph signings.

Sunday my mom and I ventured to Mary Jane which is known for its' bumps (mogul) skiing and managed to find trails to ski on that didn't have any moguls, which is good because my mom does not go on trails unless they are paved (groomed). Later that afternoon I went back to the hotel to get ready to drive to Ski Cooper for the ski school end-of-season dinner while my mom continued skiing. On the way back to Winter Park from Ski Cooper I was followed by a cop for 26 miles who then pulled me over in my hotel parking lot to inform me that I had been driving "about 5 miles over the speed limit" when I first turned off the interstate (26 miles ago) and that I "endangered the life of a wild animal". Said wild animal was a moose that was standing in the middle of the road, that I very carefully drove around. If you ask me, it posed a greater threat to me than I did to it. If there is a pathetic excuse to pull me over, I think it has happened. I apparently get this cop-magnet trait from my dad and my mom just does not understand it.

Monday morning we managed to get all of our stuff packed up and visited the gift shop for souvenirs and left in a timely fashion. In Denver we stopped at Best Buy to retrieve the laptops and the mall so that my mom could go into Target for her M&M fix for the plane ride home. Aside from not being so lucky in finding the Wendy's that I was still determined to find, we did find a gas station selling hot dogs and that sufficed for lunch. I then dropped my mom off at the airport and as far as I know her trip home went uneventfully. On my way home from Denver I stopped at Mother Cabrini's Shrine and Buffalo Bill's Grave, but I'll save that for another blog, along with writing about Ski Cooper's last weekend of the season.