Up to 3.3.10

We spotted this seat on a visit to Minturn where we had had a lovely breakfast on our way to Vail. It's nice to see that old boards are still useful.
With the melt / freeze following the snow we have had recently, a curious and rather beautiful effect has materialised on the fir trees. As the snow melts, it drip from the branches then as the temperature drops again in the afternoon, it freezes, forming long delicate icicles. It is obviously what the designers of plastic icicles for Christmas trees were basing their design on, but I had no idea that the origianl were so lovely.
On our day off, we went over to Breckenridge which is about 40 miles away and is where The Boss has a second Chalet. The hostesses, we met a while ago when they came over for a day’s skiing in Vail, and we were going over to see them and to go skiing with a friend of ours from Whitbourne that I was at School with. The town of Breckenridge is a really old place having been established in 1859 (I have seen British Rail sandwiches that old), and is full of charming Victorian Houses making up the High Street. All lit up at night it adds a mystical quality, and it is known as a historical gem of a Town. We met up with our co-hostesses and the friends, and set off skiing. It was snowing all day and we were guided around the slopes in a fairly cautious manner because the visibility was pretty bad. At one point we split up into a hardcore downthelumpybits party and a idontwanttofalloversoletstakeitsteady group. Going down, we lost Sue and for a longish while (about half an hour), I was waiting half way down a run and wondering if she was going to walk down ( it was a flat joining / poling bit that was hard with her hurting shoulder) or if she had fallen and was injured so she couldn’t walk down. Eventually a text! That she was in one piece and down at the bottom of a run having been helped out of a soft snow pile by the second group whom we thought were in front of us. All’s well that ends well but for a moment I really wished we had had these short wave radio thingies to communicate with.
The skiing was difficult to assess because we stayed low and the visibility was so bad we didn’t really anything very testing, but it did seem ideal for the beginner with a steep bit at the top of the run with a flattening out down towards the bottom and a rather tame last bit to the lift.
A meal at Fatty’s in the evening was ace, with the coach for the USA Men’s Freestyle Board Team turning up in the middle of the evening to a round of applause and cheering. Slightly ironic because he was on crutches as he had broken his leg the previous evening in a run down the course after the competition.
All the waitresses wore Gold-coloured medals in honour of the USA team and our hostesses begged two as souvenirs. Plenty of patriotism here.
All in all an eventful day and we wended our way home and it started to snow as we climbed up to the Vail Pass.
It has snowed off and on most of last week and added about 20 inches on the mountain which makes for lovely skiing. On our next day off we opted for a free guided tour starting from a yurt at the top of Vail, and were joined by two of our guests. I managed to get down one particular run that has been the location of my last two crashes, one self-managed and the other a blind T-bone, so hopefully laying a ghost and the skiing was lovely as we dipped and dived between the trees. The guide gave us some local history including the fact that the Two Elk Lodge ( a huge mountain-top restaurant), had been burned to the ground by an arsonist eco-warrior who didn’t want the back bowls to be opened up for skiing. She also knew her birds and identified my mysterious red-throated and capped finch as a Rose Finch who was a laggard who should have gone south for the winter but had stayed behind as they sometimes did, for our benefit. The local bird at the top of the mountain is the Canadian Jay, also know as the Camprobber because of it’s habit of stealing food from the hands of the customers. It is a pretty drab sort of bird colourwise, but you can’t have everything and the views it had were glorious.
We had another lost companion situation and eventually linked back up an hour later after we had circled back round the route we had taken to check down tree holes. During the meeting up, we hung back so we wouldn’t get caught in any flare-up as the two stories were exchanged and blame was apportioned (differently in each case - surprisingly!). She didn’t carry her phone because there was no need as her partner carried his (!) and the ever-so-useful pair of two-way radios were in no danger of getting lost as they were sitting on the bedside table in their bedroom because it was hard to remember how to use them because they were never taken out.
Anyway the rest of the day, while a little tense, went off OK so that’s all right.
Our new set of guests has arrived and they could be our last as we have a blank book after the 12th March. This has all sorts of permutations as our employment could be curtailed early, which in turn has implications for when we fly back because we can’t afford to travel for two months and of course we will be a month’s wages short. We will discuss with the boss but who knows, we might be back by the end of March.
It would seem that the new guests were expecting to be located actually in the village of Beaver Creek instead of in Avon and were chuntering a bit about the inconvenience. In fact they had booked through an agent who hadn’t given them the full information. Mind you they were also chuntering about the lack of power in the hot tub jets, the fact that it was icy outside and they were concerned for their health, and worst of all, that the beds squeaked! This could be a long two weeks!
On one of our shopping trips, I was trying to top up my stock of painkillers and was told by the Pharmacist that I couldn’t get Paracemamol as it wasn’t licensed in America but that Tylenol (active ingredient Acetaminophen) would do the trick. With a little research, because I didn’t understand, I discovered that the full scientific name of Acetaminophen was Para-acetylyaminophenol and the scientific name for Paracetamol was – Para-acetylyaminophenol and the only difference lies in the selection of the letters from the scientific name for the generic name ie. Para-acetylyaminophenol or Para-acetylyaminophenol - amazing!
Our quilting guest went for a second meeting of the 7th Day Pencecostal Quilters and was narrowly saved from being saved but once again resisted although had to endure a second wave of persuasion via an Evangelizing Rant on the radio in the car on her way home.
The ex-RAF guest has a rich store of bon mots and one evening offered the following – She was only the telegraphist’s daughter, but she certainly knew how her Da-Da Didit. Ho ho!
We will be sorry to see our current lot of guests go, they have been appreciative of our efforts to make their stay a memorable one and are good company, but all good things come to an end, whether guests or ski hosting.