Killington 2008/9 - Day 7

Day 7 - More words about Skiing and food
by Mick Hegarty

The weather was better today, so my Great Plan was to use our advantage of “being on English time” to get out early and catch the first lifts at 8am (ie: 1pm UK time). The reality of course was that we had flopped onto US time about 5 minutes after arriving here, so we got up slowly, had a slow breakfast, and drifted out to the slopes at about 10:30.

We headed down to the base via Carpenters Run, which is a really nice family run through the trees - you rarely see other skiers and it is generally very quiet and peaceful:
.
You know, when I die, I will be like the Czechoslovakian politician Vladamir Clementis mentioned in Milan Kundera’s novel “The Book of Laughter and Forgetting”, who only exists in photos in the form of his hat. In Clementis’ case it is because he fell out of favour, was hung, and then was airbrushed out of all photos (they forgot the hat, which he had leant to a colleague). In my case I am never in favour long enough to fall out of it, and don’t get into the photos in the first place. No one in our family will take photos, so I have to take them all and then don’t really exist when we look back at them later. It’s thus an added joy that they criticise me* while I’m taking them (Michael roared at me when I took this video clip for example) only to Ooh and Ahh about them once we are home.

Anyway, enough whinging. After a bit of skiing we headed up to the top of Killington Peak for lunch. We split in two, with the “Green Team” (Clare, Liam and Ciaran) taking the gentle Highlander slope, while the “Blue Team” (Mike and I) took Bittersweet. I am an imposter really, as I’m nervy on the steeper Blue runs, whereas Mike is confident, graceful and fast as hell.


The steeper runs are exhilarating and its one of those oddities of life that you feel most alive when the only thing in your mind is sudden painful death!

We had a nice lunch at the peak – the food was the usual but the view is spectacular (you can see five states plus Canada) and while we were there the snow came in and visibility dropped to almost nothing for a while. This was somewhat poignant for Clare and I as one of our most memorable evenings was a dinner in Windows on the World with The Goblins about 20 years ago where the same thing happened and we came out on a snow-covered world.

After lunch we did a couple more runs then Liam and Ciaran headed back to the hotel leaving Clare, Mike and I to finish the afternoon on Easy Street – a basic run as the name suggests but the find of the trip for us this year. One of the many things we love about Killington (and staying at the Grand Resort) is the freedom it gives the boys. Its massive - there are something like 200 trails - but it’s a very safe environment, and the benefit of a “ski-in ski-out” hotel is that there is lots of flexibility for people with different interests to do their own thing.

We finished up at Yoshi Sushi and the famous Hibachi dinner. The food is great, cooked right in front of you, but it’s the showmanship of the chef that makes it special, including the famous volcano made out of onion rings. Clare’s mum Nuala commented after reading the first couple of days that all we seemed to do was eat and it is true! We all love our grub and the great thing about a skiing holiday is that you can eat like a horse and actually lose weight. Or at least that is the Great Plan….

* Liam saw a good T-shirt: “If a man is standing in the middle of the forest speaking and there is no woman around to hear him . . . is he still wrong?”

Killington 2008/9 - Day 6

Day 6 – New Year's Day
by guest writer Michael Hegarty

My new year started with a bang…or rather a splatter, as Liam threw up over the side of his bed at 12:10am, January 1st 2009. As I’m typing now in the warm hotel room the smell of vomit still hangs in the air, the product of not one, not two, but three separate puking sessions in the wee hours of the morning. Each time Liam managed to wake me up, but I’m not complaining. However much it sucked for me, it sucked way more for him. This explosive but short-lived bug regrettably confined him to the sofa until just now, so he missed out on a whole day of skiing.

It was probably a good day for him to miss, though. Temperatures have been steadily declining since the gooey slushfest that was Sunday, and are bottoming out about this very evening: 0° Fahrenheit (-18°C). Take the enormous wind chill factor into account, and you’re looking at conditions that feel around -25°C for any lift technicians or snow groomers still up in the mountains. Brr.

Although I’m told it was warmer than this at 9:30 this morning when Dad and I set out, my still frozen fingertips are yet to be convinced. Liam was out for the count and Ciaran was pleading exhaustion, so Mum stayed in with them, leaving just the two Michaels to brave the storm. Walking out of the hotel into the wind was like walking face-first into a cactus. The already freezing torrent of air carried with it tiny particles of ice and grit that ripped at any unfortunate inch of exposed flesh and carried its warmth off downwind. Dad, utterly barefaced, paused for a moment a few steps away from the hotel door, as if it was taking every drop of resolve he possessed to not simply bottle it, drop the skis and scuttle back inside to the warm, heavy air of the lobby.

We bravely pressed on through the unusually empty car park. At the bottom of a lift we spoke to a Killington “mountain ambassador”, who told us that because of the wind a handful of our most frequently used lifts were out of action, namely the lifts for Snowshed and Killington peak. This limited our movements to really only two of the six peaks.

Logic dictates that those lifts still running despite the wind are located in areas not really affected by the wind, sheltered and unexposed.
No dice.
We got onto the express lift at Ramshead and were ravaged and robbed of our warmth for a full ten minutes. We could do nothing but sit and wait, and lose sensation in our extremities. The air managed to find a direct route to my wrists, my neck, my arse and my forehead, creating a biting localised coldness that was actually quite painful. My goggles began to frost over at the top, then over one eye, then completely. By the time we stiffly slid off the chair I was flying blind, and had to take the goggles off. It would take an absolutely magical run to make up for the ride up, and while the run back down the mountain didn’t quite make the grade, it was still pretty fantastic. The snow was fresh and responsive, though I had trouble seeing it through watering eyes. The slope was practically empty but for the occasional foolhardy boarder.

After another freezing but thoroughly enjoyable run from the top of Snowdon peak we retreated, our tails between our legs, to our hotel room. The boys were sitting watching an all-day Looney Toons marathon, which I’d wager they’d been watching nearly since we left. We slouched around the room for an hour or two, but the sun was shining outside, the slopes gleaming and empty and I was soon itching to be out again. I’ve really fallen in love with skiing on another level this holiday. I did my first full-length black diamond run yesterday, which was not only intensely exhilarating, but also gave me the most profound sense of satisfaction once I’d reached the bottom and craned my neck up to look back at the mess of ice and moguls I’d just navigated. Doubtless, I was ungraceful and hesitant, but still…

I managed to drag Ciaran and Mum out for half-past one. The wind had died down but it was still colder than any other day this week. To get to the beloved old Great Eastern we took two trails: Northbrook Trail and Carpenter’s Run. They were quiet and extremely pretty, but as flat as a freestyle boarder’s nose. No, wait, that’s not quite true. At one point you have to ski uphill.

From here we found our old friend the Great Eastern. Dad has often talked about the “millionaire moment” you get on some points in Great Eastern, when you stop for a moment by the side of the trail and can’t hear anything but the flakes of snow fluttering down. Today when we paused on GE it was true that we still couldn’t hear anything but snow. Artificial snow, that is, screaming out of the snowmakers irritatingly posted every 10m along the trail. There was a faulty one near the bottom that was spraying out a sort of gooey wet ice that only froze after it stuck to my goggles. Fortunately, we’re so very fond of this run, the only single run that connects the top of the highest peak to the very lowest lodge in Killington, that no amount of vicious snowblowers could make it unenjoyable.

Mum and Ciaran sat and enjoyed a long coffee and a cookie at the bottom of Great Eastern while I raced to the top in order to repeat it again, this time at my own pace. I love skiing with my family, but they really are a pretty slow bunch. A lot of my time on family runs is spent standing still a few hundred yards down the trail from them, drumming the ice with my poles. The run was disappointing. I had foolishly and impatiently overtightened my boots, and by the bottom had quite painful lower legs.

Upon meeting Mum and Ciaran again we made our way back to Snowshed via the (mercifully) heated Gondola and the deceptively exposed Northbrook Quad. We froze our butts off again. I ended up on a different chair to Mum and Ciaran, who I tried to entertain when the lift spluttered to a halt in the middle of a fierce gale. I jumped around in my chair and threw the bobble on my hat from side to side. I apparently helped a little, though not enough to prevent one of them from being reduced to tears by the cold. After what seemed like a polar expedition, the lift started up again. The plan was that they were going to head straight home via Snowshed and I was going to diverge and do some “monster skiing” as Mum calls it. I decided collapsing on the sofa in a few minutes rather than bouncing down icy cliffs sounded too good to resist, and so took Snowshed with them. Hey, if I felt like I’d made the wrong decision, I thought, I could always turn on to Channel 14 to catch “Fall of the day”. Watching snowboarders tumble down rocky gulches head over heels and smack face-first into trees always makes you feel glad to be inside.

Editors note: despite Mike's best efforts to distract him from the cold, Ciaran took some to recover back in the hotel room:

Killington 2008/9 - Day 5

Day 5 – 5th day alone
by guest writer Sydney the catish cato

"Miaow Mioaaw Miioooaw mioaaw mioooawww mioaw mioaw mioaww."
Tranlations
("I am cato. I like to eat. I miss the big ones. I am cato.")
"Miaow Miaoww Miaoooww miaow miaow mioaw mioaw mioaw oaw mioaw mioaw miiooaaww."
Translations
("The big ones have not been here for several darks now but a friendly female big one has fed me.")
By Sydney aka Cato.

Day 5 – New Years Eve

Guest Writer for the second time Ciaran Hegarty

We get up at 7:30 which disgraces me seeing as I asked dad to wake us up at 6:45 so we can get out for 8:00 when the lifts open. Now normally I could eat my breakfast and get dressed to be out for 8:00 in just over half an hour but I live with Liam so the extra half an hour would be for Liam. So I have my breakfast and then I start to get dressed but then I cant find any of my clothes so by time we’re out it’s about 8:20. So we do snowshed again for 15,000,000 time but still you can’t get bored of good old snowshed. When we reach the bottom we do it again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. And again. Then liam got bored and decided to turn in. So he went in leaving only me, mike, dad and mum and so we challenge the mountain RAMSHEAD!

Now to be taken over By CCCCCClare HHegarty! Clap clap clap.

Skiing lunches all have a number of similarities. Some of the surroundings are nicer than others i.e. they are less busy or have amazing views but the food and ambience are all pretty much the same. The prize for the least pleasant by a mile though has to go to Ramshead. Firstly, it is the centre for the children’s lessons, so is full of instructors with little teams of would-be skiers. These children are quite cute on skis but off skis, they just take up a lot a valuable space. Secondly, there are no windows so nothing to remind you that you are in the middle of the mountains in beautiful Vermont. But overwhelmingly, there is the smell which is beyond description and should never be present in an eating establishment. If I haven’t convinced you that you should never eat there, I have more. The best thing about skiing is that it is wonderful exercise, which takes place in beautiful surroundings, which the whole family can enjoy. The worst thing about it is the amount of faffing that you have to do to get to that point. Skiing down a hill is sublime, walking uphill in skis is tricky and storing skis & poles for a whole family and then walking about inside in boots and the 5 layers of clothing necessary to keep the cold out outside is exhausting and definitely brings out the worst in people. For our particular lunch, I sat with a super aggressive American woman behind who berated her husband to anyone who would listen for half an hour. His crime was that he had skied off with the car keys and a screaming baby needed to be taken home. For some reason, the phone calls that he received from his wife didn’t seem to be bring him back to the lodge any quicker! In front of me was a teenage autistic boy who rocked himself to oblivion throughout – his response to his environment never made more sense to me !

Escape from Ramshead lodge and the smell and back to the beautiful mountain. Ciaran and I completed one last run from the top of Ramshead and then joined Liam back in the hotel.

For New Year, we hadn’t been quick enough to get the Hibachi table that we wanted at Sushi Yoshi but we were able to get in there for regular Chinese Food. We were seated at our table in time for 7pm, which was midnight in the UK. So we ate our meal whilst talking to family in the UK to wish them a Happy New Year and texting friends.

Our fortune cookies took on the extra significance of New Year’s resolutions and are recorded here:

Mick – In great attempts it is glorious even to fail
Clare – Good sense is the master of human life.
Mike – Act well your part there the honour lies.
Liam – Aim at the stars, but keep your feet on the ground.
Ciars – A truly great person never puts away the simplicity of a child.

Happy New Year and best wishes for 2009 to all our readers!

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.

Killington 2008/9 - Day 3

First day skiing
by guest writer Ciaran Hegarty (aka the greatest)

We get up at 6:30 Mike and me straight up, however Liam takes a bit more persuading. We have our breakfast of American cereal but for some pop tarts, which I can’t understand how, someone could eat or even hold! We head out to get our skis which is pretty boring so I’m not gonna talk about it.

We start with snowshed a great slope for beginners but still fun for hardcore skiers. This is just perfect for us because although we’re not hardcore skiers we are familiar with skiing so we go down snowshed still getting back our skiing legs as mum calls them. Mike races down getting his ski legs back straight away, but all the rest of us are still a bit nervous and so we take our time.

By the time me, mum, dad, and Liam reach the bottom of snowshed we all decided to do it again so we did except this time on the lift up I start to complain about the way I can’t parallel ski but Mike, Mum and dad can. So on the way down Mike slowly teaches me tricks of how to parallel ski, and not to boast (well maybe just a little) in 3 to 5 minutes I’m parallel skiing. So going down concentrating on paralleling I take about 10 to 16 hours on getting down to the bottom.
Seeing as we’re all at the bottom of snowshed by the greatest waffle house in the world we buy waffles. Now I could go on forever explaining about the waffles (which was the main reason I wrote this blog) so I think you’d prefer if I skipped this bit. After our heavenly terrifically sweet waffles that are so………- 6 months later – I could eat a hundred of and which have just the right amount of……….- 8 months later – that just are made to perfection, oh sorry did I drag on sorry what I meant to say was after we had our amazing waffles we decided to do a trail called the great eastern. So to get there we take the snowshed express quad up and take a track called the highlander which takes us straight to the K1 gondola that leads us to Killington peak so we take what we know as the great eastern which we do every year when we notice none of the signs say were going down great eastern. So we stop at the next map and see that they’ve changed the great eastern and just about screwed everything up! So in our disgrace we decided to go to our favourite restaurant called Noel’s so we take the trail that leads us there.

Unfortunately the so called “snow” on this trail was icy and a word me and mike invented it’s called snice, as in snow and ice and also as in it’s nice which it really isn’t nice but still. The snice gave me a problem it made my skis cross which meant I wasn’t controlling the skis. By the time we reached Noel’s I was tired and grumpy so we went in and ate. At Noel’s they have paper over the table and they give you some crayons and well these are some that I drew:

After we had our delicious lunch we decided to find the quickest way home and the way to do that meant that we’d have to take a lift up then take a trail to the bottom of bear mountain, (see map) then take juggernaut down to skyeship and take the gondola up, and then after that we had to take the northbrook quad up to snowshed and then ski down and bam right next to the hotel. Now you don’t need to look at the map to see that’s a long way home, but unfortunately the only other way home was to take blue runs which no one was up for. Seeing as Liam was really tired and really grumpy (if Liam’s reading I meant to say a bit and to the readers WINK WINK) we took the green way only to find that at the bottom of Bear Mountain that the juggernaut was closed. This made Liam a tiny – cough cough, a lot more, cough cough- bit more grumpy but luckily there was another route we go a lift that leads us to the top of Skye peak and then we take down “the great eastern” to the Northbrook crossover and then from there we carry on with the original plan. On the lift up me and mum had a talk with a woman who said a mountain ambassador told her that because on Saturday and Sunday it rained Monday would be I-C-Y and unfortunately our first day skiing was Monday. So we started the “the great eastern” only to find that it was steep and I-C-Y (don’t add comments asking why does he say I-C-Y instead of icy please just don’t) so this made Liam a little bit more o heck I’m not gonna lie it made him as grumpy as a cat who had just been eaten by a giant ice cream cone that is friends with a giant bucket of peas with 3 eyes 2 mouths and 1 pig nose and a donkey for a tail! After 99 years 99 months 99 fortnights 99 weeks 99 days 99 hours 99 minutes 99 seconds and 99 milliseconds of Liam stopping then skiing for a minute then stopping for 10 then skiing for 1 then… we reached the bottom of the Northbrook crossover.

So you’d think Liam would be pleased that he only had to go up one more lift, down one more slope, across one more bridge and walk through one more door to get to the hotel but no instead he has to sit down. So mum me and mike go up the lift and do snowshed a couple of times and then that’s the end of my story about skiing that day.

My final conclusion of that day is skiing is great, Liam is silly, waffles are great and blue whales should wear hats.

Killington 2008/9 - Day 2

And on to Killington
by Clare Hegarty

Sleep is a great healer and tiredness ensured that the boys didn’t even object to sharing a double bed. The hotel was a familiar one and the breakfast lived up to its memory. At least we had the car outside so that we could get straight on with the last leg of our journey.

We had in mind a beautiful town in Vermont called Woodstock, which we had passed through many times but never stopped. Woodstock has that picture perfect New England look to it, particularly at this time of the year. It has beautiful architecture and is completed with snowdrifts at the side of the road and wreaths on all the doors. We lucked out with our choice of restaurant with Bentleys, which was having a jazz brunch, an unusual pair of musicians, a saxophonist and a guitarist, something to give Mike & Ciarz some ideas! The food was good too and the two pints of local beer just finished it off and me!

We’ve become so familiar with Killington now that everything about the journey is part of tradition. First, we pass Bill & Blanche’s Pancake House (usually a stop but not this time), then the first view of the ski slopes (again usually lots of oohs & ahhs but this time concern about the lack of snow) and finally the smell of the hotel lobby, a mixture of the wood fire and snow dampened carpets drying out.

It’s our fifth time in this hotel, so although the rooms are almost identical, we are quickly able to identify the differences and assess their positive or negative implications – a bit like a spot the difference competition. For the record, this room has good artwork, lots of chairs and a good view of the slopes, but it is a long walk from the pool and even a longer walk at the end of the day with aching muscles and heavy ski boots.

Another essential part of the Hegarty Family holiday is the pool. There is nothing quite like it. It is open air and heated to a degree that the condensation coming off in the cold air makes it difficult to see from one side of the pool to the other. Another hazard is that wet hair will freeze so hard that your head aches, so once your hair is wet, you have to frequently immerse yourself in the bath warm water to melt your head and keep comfortable. If the pool isn’t warm enough for you, there is the scalding hot Jacuzzi, which is my favourite place to chat and to observe the stars. Boys being boys, they of course prefer to play who can stand on the side of the pool longest with the added variation of who can rub icy snow on their bodies before jumping back in the pool!

Killington 2008/9 - Day 1

The journey - would you do it for £2,800?

by Clare Hegarty

(Ed's note: Well of course you would, its a no-brainer! Except that lots of families offered it before us said no, so what was the catch?)

(2pm GMT) The offer seemed innocuous enough to start with; delay our journey for one hour for £560 each. Oh but the flight wasn’t direct, we would have to fly to Washington Dulles and change to an internal flight to Boston. The thing was the flights hadn’t cost us that much to start with, but the hotel bill was going to be astronomical with the low pound, so it was very tempting as and we succumbed to it. There is no such thing as a free lunch and ours wasn’t, we had £25 towards it but we had to hold onto our bags while we ate it.

We struck a deal with the boys, £100 for each of them and £2,500 towards our summer holiday. We cheered them up with thoughts of seeing the airport where Die Hard 2 was based, how they would spend their share of the money and on the thought that we might not get called up.

We were called, so our paths were set, but an upgrade was promised which cheered us up immensely.

(5pm GMT) The flight was very comfortable with extra legroom and spare seats to spread out.

(12:30 GMT 7:30pm ET) The arrival at Dulles was shocking, standing at immigration for an hour to be admitted, we were the last group from the plane but then this was dead time.

(2:00am GMT 9:00pm ET) The immigration officer was charming as ever but I couldn’t get over the incongruity of the large tough looking black man who was called Hyacinthe. The hour wait had broken Ciaran’s spirits – he needed food fast and an Obama golf ball fast apparently. Mick provided most of the entertainment for us by calling the car company to explain that we wouldn’t be picking the car up today but tomorrow. He explained it so nicely and patiently but put the phone down muttering about “missiles having been launched” and “still need to pick up car tonight”.

The flight was delayed and spirits would have been low had we not spent the time worrying about Sydney and what the alternative would have been like – if we had taken her skiing! We imagined everything from strapping four little mini-skis on to her feet, her first sights and smells of snow and of course her skiing down a gentle slope. The flight delay announcements were made more charming by the indeterminate species of the creature making them.

(11:00pm ET 4:00am GMT) We’re on the plane! Could have been the best plane in the world, could have been the worst – I slept for the entire 90 minutes

(12:30am ET 5:30am GMT) We’re in Boston only 5 hours later than planned, but like they said in Outnumbered airport hours are like days in the outside world.

Mick and I are seasoned travellers, able to adapt our arrangements, so we’d failed with the car but we had switched our hotel reservation from one about an hour North of Boston to one at the airport, so the plan now was to split up, Mick to pick up the car and the rest of us to get the courtesy bus to the hotel. That didn’t work, we were still waiting for our bus when Mick had collected the mini-van and was able to pick us up (1:30 EST 6:30am GMT).

The benefits of SatNav are huge, no matter how strange and unfamiliar the surroundings, you can find you way around with complete independence.
In this case we were able to find our way from the airport (A) to 85 American Legion Highway, Boston (B) and then to 85 American Legion Highway, Revere (C) – which is where our hotel was. It is a credit to us all that we didn’t explode.

(2:30am EST 7:30am GMT) Oh the joy of lying horizontally and sleeping………………..

So would you?