Killington 2008/9 - Day 4

Recovering from Day 3
by Clare Hegarty

Ciaran’s chirpy description of our first day skiing really doesn’t do justice to the difficulty of the conditions. Liam’s description, that has yet to be posted, is much more on the mark. They had re-routed our beloved Great Eastern route leaving us on the far side of the mountain with no choice for getting back other than via a long hard ski down treacherous and steep banks of ice. With legs still accustoming themselves to the demands of skiing, it became quite gruelling and the next morning my muscles were still feeling the effects.

It had snowed in the night, so conditions were much improved but confidence needed to be restored. Lots of runs down the familiar Snowshed in the morning and then in the afternoon, we re-discovered a little of the old family-feel Killington at Ramshead. However, it seemed that conditions must still be bad further up the mountain as we saw about 5 stretcher cases in the course of a couple of hours!

We had done home cooking on Sunday night, experienced the joys of American pizza on Monday night, so it was time to brave the cold and eat out. Strangely (for us English weather-obsessed folks) the cars here rarely have temperature gauges, so I have no idea how cold it gets here at night. I just know that it is cold enough to maker me keen with coldness. I’m sure that the heating systems in monster American cars are very efficient but they just don’t warm me up and every second spent outside, slices into exposed flesh like a knife. We shared the lift down in the hotel with one of the bellboys who advised us to try out a place called The Garlic, which does “killer pasta (pronounced parsta)”, but the idea of murderous carbohydrates just didn’t do it for me, so we headed to another old favourite – Casey’s Caboose – and had the joy for the first time of actually sitting in the caboose. The subliminal messaging had obviously got to Mick, Mike & Liam who all ordered slayer linguine or assassin fettuccine. I ignored all previous experiences of American food portions and ordered a steak. This really will kill you as the steak always covers most of a large dinner plate and half of the table. After 15 minutes of eating, all you have eaten is enough to make room for a tomato slice, then you have to explain that it was lovely but no you don’t want it bagged – you could never look at that steak again!!!

Still at least you can plead jetlag, shiver your way home and be in bed with your book by 9pm.