Steamboat - Sunday March 21, 2010

Lifts opened at 8:30. I was woken up by my lovely Cornbread at 5:30am. He was simply too excited to sleep that morning. We had 5 full days of skiing ahead of us and we were eager to get going - even if the lift operators weren't willing to open early for us;)

We got to the gondola around 9am after picking up our skis and getting ready. It was a beautiful day - totally clear, not too cold, but not too warm. Sunny, clear skies and a lot of ski runs to cover.

Our friends in the (EJ) region had booked the same week for this trip to Steamboat. The wife and children were in ski lessons all day for 3 days, so the husband skied with us everyday. It had been a while since any of us skied, so we took the first day to figure out how to do it again:)

As you look at the map,

we spent the day skiing on the entire right side of the map. We particularly enjoyed Tomahawk, Buckshot and Baby Powder. We glanced at some mogul runs and then went in the other direction - I've never been able to do moguls and I wasn't about to try to figure it out that day... Mark, however, is a seasoned skier and had no hesitation with the moguls.

We skied the entire day. I think we finally left the mountain some time after 3:00. We were sore and tired and ready to sit. We went down to the hot tub for a bit and then went out for dinner to Mahogany Ridge Brewery & Grill. We had invited our friends to join us, but they declined... and ended up showing up for their own dinner right as we were finishing ours. Mahogany Ridge is a normal brewery, but they had an interesting entree menu with 20 different kinds of dipping sauces to go with the entrees. Cornbread ordered the pork loin and I ordered the maple glazed chicken, which came with a port brew cream sauce which was amazing. We both agreed that this was the best restaurant meal we had had in a very long time.

We had full intentions of going back to the resort and play cards with Mark and Jane that evening, but as we were sitting at dinner, we both realized that it just wasn't going to happen - we were WAY too tired. So we grabbed a movie at the redbox and went back to the room. I believe I saw about 15 minutes of the movie before finally giving in (it wasn't hard to give in as the movie was terrible) and falling asleep. We cashed out for the night, ready for an great night of sleep... if this is how we'd feel for the entire trip, it was going to be a long week:)