Our Love of Killington

No, we didn’t fall off the ends of the earth after we left Philadelphia. We did, however, fall headlong into the true-blue nomadic lifestyle: we sold our house. We hope the flurry of packing, moving, and closing adequately explains the absence of blogs for the past week. If not, please contact our customer service department for a full refund for those missed blogs.

To answer your inevitable questions (that some of you might have, that is), no, we aren’t moving to Florida as originally planned, at least not yet: we plan to get back down there later this year or early next and spend a more thorough amount of time deciding on the area and neighborhood than we had a chance to do in February. Until then, specifically until middle November, our travel calendar is pretty well filled in with all sorts of interesting adventures, from an east-bound transatlantic crossing and a month on the island of Ibiza, to two more visits to Northern England and (if the stars align) a month in Florence, Italy. Stay tuned.

So back to our winter road trip…

The peak of our road trip (so to speak) was to ski at Killington, Vermont. It’s been an odd winter for our friends in New England: Boston hardly got a flake of snow until January, and then February became the snowiest month on record. All of New England had been covered by two back-to-back nor’easters just before we got there, and the ski resorts from Vermont to Maine were wallowing in feet of the white stuff. We’ve been going to Killington for over a decade now, and many times we’ve been barely half the mountain’s skiable terrain was open. Not so this time.

That’s not to say we had beautiful weather the whole time: of the six days we were there, we had three good weather days, including the bluebird day in the pictures below. The other three days it snowed. But hey, that’s what we were there to enjoy. That and our familiarity with this particularly beautiful corner of the world.

We’ve lost count of the number of times we’ve been to Killington. We’re pretty sure it’s around a dozen. We know that’s insignificant for many people who live in New England, but keep in mind that getting to Vermont–whether by plane, train, or automobile–has always been a bit of an effort for us. We go to Killington not because it’s convenient, but because we want to go there. For all those ski aficionados who are certainly thinking, “Why not the Rockies?” the answer is that we’ve spent all our lives at, or very close to, sea level. Killington’s 4,000 feet or so of elevation is much more enjoyable than the oxygen-gasping 8,000 feet that most Rocky Mountain resorts start at.

And now that we’ve been here a dozen or so times, we know this mountain very well. Every time we visit reinforces that familiarity a little more, especially as (some of) our skills increase (none of us grew up skiing). It’s comforting that we know the nooks and crannies of the 2+ miles of the Great Eastern trail from top to bottom, that we know what beer the lodges serve, and that we don’t have to think about where we want to drive when the ski day is over.

So we’ll continue to make the trek to Killington when there’s snow there, and we’ll always consider it a great ski season when we can accomplish at least one top-to-bottom run of Great Eastern.