Driving my Teen to Ski Team Was a Blessing in Disguise
My son’s ski team season ended Friday with a final race, the tradition for which: dress up in costumes. He reluctantly wore a gold cape from our costume box.
Early in the morning, I dropped him off at his race, then zoomed a couple miles down the interstate to Royal Gorge, North America’s largest cross-country ski area, where I slapped on a pair of impossibly skinny rental skis and headed out onto their groomed trails to try my hand (or feet, I guess,) at Nordic skiing. Let’s just say there were quite a few “banana peel” moments--I slipped and fell a bunch.
But it was a glorious March day in the Sierra Nevada--a bluebird sky and mild temps. I skied/crashed my way down the trails with a friend, chatting with her and bemoaning my lack of Nordic skill for a couple of hours. Later, we sat on weathered picnic tables on a deck overlooking the hill I took my first two tumbles on and ate lunch, socially distanced, but otherwise it felt almost normal: just a lovely day out skiing with a friend. And earning a few bruises.
After lunch, I swooped back up the highway, picked up my post-race kid, and we drove home recounting tales of our respective day’s adventures.
Back in December when my son decided he wanted to join the ski team, my brain almost exploded: how would my husband and I get our kid to the mountains for training and racing 1-2 weekdays for 2 months? What would the “lucky” driver do during the 4-5 hours our son skied?--no cafes open to go hang out in, no stores to browse because COVID, and despite the relatively balmy March day I’ve described, it’s the Sierra in winter, often cold, too cold to sit in the car in the ski resort parking lot for hours working on a laptop.
But we soldiered on: My husband and I took turns driving our racer up to the peaks, and we improvised. We snowshoed, hiked, Alpine skied, cross-country skied, and once, I even learned how to be a gatekeeper for a slalom race (it was stressful, but I figured I should try to be a good citizen and put in some volunteer hours).
A few days were snowy and cold, but some were mild, and the Sierra is always beautiful, so having a weekly/biweekly commitment to spend a weekday up there turned out to be a delight rather than burden, for several reasons:
Getting the heck out of my house for a whole entire day at a time
Spending time with my teenager, away from screens
Enjoying sunny days (sometimes)
Exercising (hard to come by during the pandemic, at least for me)
Being creative to plan each week’s adventure
Maybe next year I’ll be the one wearing the gold cape.