Due primarily to our work situation we don’t get as much time together as most families do, or should.  Our time comes in dense doses during vacations. We scheduled a ski trip to North Conway over February break and waited until the last minute to plan it out. We decided to break up the two skiing days with a low(er) key day at the indoor waterpark to avoid the complete melt downs that had occurred during our previous ski vacation which we had coupled with two nights at a theme hotel. We left late on Saturday after what seemed like an eternity of time spent packing.  There are times the Cowles and Howley approaches to living conflict and trip preparation is definitely one of those.  It worked out for the best though because dinner fell around the time we had hit Ossipee and Cristin found a good BBQ place on Yelp that backed up to the trails of the defunct ski area Mt. Whittier which meant that more than 50% of the clientele had arrived by snowmobile, or “sled” as they prefer to call the vehicles. Ossipee also claims to have invented the snowmobile but a quick read on wiki indicates there is some disagreement about that fact.  We finished the trip to the Residence Inn with sufficient time for a dip in the pool which was filled with families who had just returned from dinner after a day on the slopes. The pool was fairly full of boisterous pre-teen boys and Ellie was a bit shy about this but Phoebe didn’t care and initiated a sequence of no less than three dozen jumps in the pool.Eventually we made our way to the hot tub where I told the girls about the sadistic behavior of Aunt Sarah and myself at their age involving oscillating visits from the hot tub to the pool and back.  I don’t have the will to do that anymore. Surprisingly, at least in the case of Ellie, this prompted them to do the same thing. I stuck them in bed and packed up the ski stuff for the morning.

We headed to Cranmore which is a bit pricey but well regarded. They have their own “children’s center” which is extremely well organized comes with an entire section of the mountain dedicated to teaching kids. We left them there and I found myself skiing alone as Cristin has somehow become timid about things.  I took this opportunity to explore the mountain I had not been to in thirty years.   The only part that I have memory of, a unique but ultimately inefficient lift called the “skimobile” is long gone, replaced by the popular Doppelmayr detachable quad which probably has 10x-15x the uphill capacity of that skimobile with 10% of the charm.  It was a hot day and many of the kids were in shorts and t-shirts. Snowboarding is still popular but freestyle skiing has come into play and there were a lot of kids, primarily boys, between 10 and early teens on freestyle (bidirectional) skis and no poles, most of them spending time on the terrain parks. I watched the girls in their lesson for a bit and honestly was not that impressed with their experience.  There was way too much downtime and I felt the instructors lost a lot of time just shuffling kids around.  We grabbed some lunch and took the kids on mountain to spend the day with them on a portion of the mountain that faced south, away from the rising breeze.  The heat and sunlight created a fairly heavy snow which was tougher on the legs but somewhat beneficial as it slowed the girls down a bit. We took a late afternoon break at the warming house on the top that has spectacular views across the Saco river valley all the way up to Mt. Washington which was, as usual, stuck in its own personal cloud. We caught the last few lifts up and packed up and went to Elvios for pizza, a place we had dined during our previous Thanksgiving trip to North Conway. When we got home the girls wanted to go swimming so we returned to the post-ski juvenile boy mayhem until it was bedtime.  The girls watched a Muppets special on the web-enabled TV and ate popcorn and I stuck them in their bed. I returned to the room no more than two minutes after kissing them good night and Ellie was already asleep.

If she is happy it is very hard to get a read on her level of fatigue and keeping up with an older sister often means she is often pushed pretty hard. Monday was President’s day and we hadn’t planned much for the morning since Cristin had “an hour” of work to do. I brought in my special Cristin time estimate multiplier (5x) and quickly determined I had to entertain them through at least early afternoon. We spent the morning in the hotel lobby doing “coding” and then went out to lunch at McDs. The North Conway McDonalds has retired gondolas you can sit in for lunch and I had faint memories of being there three decades prior. After that we went to EMS to look at gear, awaiting Cristin’s text message that her work was finished. We picked her up and the four of us went to the Kahuna Laguna, the indoor waterpark at the Red Jacket.

We had been there the prior Thanksgiving where Phoebe had spent some time working through her fears. This time the main issue came when we had to leave. I caved on the “one more time” down the water slides roughly five times and then finally put my foot down and Phoebe lost it. The Kahuna Laguna should just film Phoebe’s tearful departure and put that up their webpage, especially if they include her question posed in her sad cracking voice about whether “we would ever return their again in our lives”. Between the Laguna and Storyland and Cristin’s growing love for North Conway, I can smell another lost summer weekend. We had Tex-Mex for dinner at Jaliscos and hit the bunks for a good night sleep.   Tuesday we packed and headed to King Pine Ski area. This is one of the few New Hampshire ski places I have never been to. It is a bit outside North Conway and Cristin was panicked to find zero cell coverage at the mountain.  It was a bit hectic getting equipment and tickets prior to the girls 10 a.m. lesson but the staff there made it happen and we dropped the girls with the instructors. The ski school is much more low key compared to Cranmore so we didn’t quite know what to expect.  The mountain is also pretty small with a vertical drop of only 350 feet or so, coming in 56th out of 63 New England ski areas, the only smaller places being municipal rope tows and college hills.

The buildings Cristin has worked in all have greater vertical extents. However, none of these things ultimately took away from the experience. On our first trip up without the ladies, Cristin and I looked down at a ski school and there was Phoebe and Ellie skiing down the mountain in an organized train of kids. After lunch we took the kids out and Ellie went without the leash and I was absolutely amazed by the progress they had made during the morning lessons. There were zero lift lines the entire day so despite the limit in vertical drop we put in a lot of mileage at the mountain before catching the last lift shortly before it closed.  We had a great experience at King Pine and will head back there soon. We had semi-promised another trip to McD on the way home but Cristin and I were desperate for some real food and she found a brew pub in Rochester, NH. The name (“Revolution”) and decor were a bit hipster for my tastes but the food was excellent.  Cristin drove us home and we were back to where we started, compressed under the weight of too much work.