Big Honking Update......

It's been a while since I updated the goings on with the Hall Clan. Well it just so happens that we've returned from an EPIC trip (not sure why folks use the word EPIC so much lately and why its always in caps but I didn't want to be left out)...........to Vail, Colorado. Story and pics in abundance follow!

This trip was planned back in the fall and the idea all along was that little Reese would spend the week here with Nana - either at our house or hers. That little fact alone caused some unrest with Kim and I....not that we don't trust Nana with Reese but there is a sense of - Will Reese behave? Will she be ok away from both of us for so many days? Will she go bonkers on Nana and drive her up a wall? I was going to be ok with the process because I travel all the time anyway but when I leave, Kim is there and Reese is at the house with familiar things. This time would be different though...even I was uneasy. So we packed up the world on Sunday night and took Reese to Calhoun....

This is for five nights. The entire back of my truck was full. Pack and play, high chair, food, sippies, clothes, toys, lovies (Puppa and Elmo), POTTY....I mean everything we could think of, we sent. I'm fairly certain that being removed from familiar things was not going to be an issue once we took a look at the situation.

We had a great meal with PawPaw and Nana and then put Reese to bed Sunday night. We left our little girl for a week long trip for the first time since she was born and this Daddy found it to be harder than I had imagined. Kim was strong...I was sort of weak. Oh well....

When we arrived in Colorado....it didn't look like this. (although we did get this amazing day later in the week...keep reading)

It looked like this.....

Cloudy. Gray. Cold...ish 33 degrees. Light winds. But still different than home. I think we were all expecting mountains and snow but what we got at Vail put this little pic to shame. The flight was non-eventful...sometimes you get those horrible flights that are packed out and other times you get half empty flights. This was a half empty flight where Kim and I were able to sit in a three seat row and sort of spread out. We were jipped the Westbound movie from our friends at Delta but that was ok. I listened to some old school iPod tunes courtesy of my very first iPod coming back to life recently. I digress....

We take our shuttle into Vail, CO which was about 45 minutes from Eagle County Airport....better than riding two hours from Denver but probably some missed scenery as well. We were the last stop and we were a little skeptical about our accommodations. They dropped us off but we couldn't really find a check in place. Oh, and it's a little colder in Vail than at the airport. Probably around 20-ish degrees and we're looking around for a check in desk.....nothing.

We FINALLY find the place to check in...tucked into a building we thought we'd never find and came back to a very reasonable place!

Lance liked the bear ottoman. I think he took it home.

Our view from the room was nice as well...

The first pic is from the balcony....where we had plenty of fire wood. The other pic is from a bedroom window looking into a portion of Lionshead Village and behind the buildings in the pic are the slopes. From this vantage point, things look steep and it also makes the mountain seem somewhat small in terms of trails. Um, no. Bad guess.

The next pics sort of drive home that steep mentality...the girls were trying not to soil themselves looking at this mountain before us.

You essentially see only three to five runs from here. That was just a portion of what was available to us. We decide to eat, chill, and prep for Tuesday morning...skiing at Vail baby!



Kim bundles up in the room....a process that deserves it's own post and will likely earn one. Not just her but all of us....what a task.

This is our first views at the top of the Eagle Bahn gondola. It was cloudy and cold and the view was borderline impressive. We had no idea what was hidden behind clouds but we felt sure we would get to experience it later.

We spent most of the morning getting our feet underneath us. We were just trying to remember what to do and how to do it....we've not been on a mountain in four years and on top of that, this is Colorado and not West Virginia! We needed to take baby steps. We hit a few beginner slopes that gradually turned into intermediates. We stayed with the girls for several hours and then stopped for a break. We asked this nice lady about how to navigate to some additional intermediate slopes and we essentially got lost. Things aren't mapped out all that well when you have no idea where you're going and we ended up "mushing", walking, dying, whatever you want to call it over this ridge that was not meant to be climbed with our equipment. It sucked. The first opportunity we had to bail onto a track....we did. I went first and sunk into soft powder immediately. I just cut a swath across the hill and turned to see where the others were......

This isn't a highly traveled section of the mountain and so it isn't easy to navigate. At this point, it looks like Kim is the only one successfully making it down the hill.

Somehow, Lance had gotten around Kim but she was resilient.....plowing the whole way down the hill. Celeste is in the background struggling to get her skis back on....she ended up walking down.

Same little road, same time basically....Lance is tired and I'm wondering where the wives went?

Later in this series of events, I dive off into the bowl that would be to the right side of this pic...my left. I thought the girls could do it. This road seemed to not have enough drop and we were all tired of mushing.....so I dropped in. Surely the girls could do it. I have never been so glad that they didn't in all my life. The vertical drop was terrifying. The steep grade was compounded by the deep powder that I just simply have not skied in much at all. That made for a cocktail of scared Adam going down this bowl....Kim and Celeste would have killed me had they dropped into this mess. Lance and I both tested ourselves that afternoon and decided that we needed to get a little more practice before we dive off into another steep bowl again.......


Part Two on Tuesday!