Cap'n John's Blog: A weekend at Mammoth

One of my coworkers has a cabin up in Mammoth Lakes and for years he'd offered me the use of it, but it wasn't until he retired that I finally took him up on his offer, so last Friday Liz, the kids and I set out on the 320 mile, 5 1/2 hour trip to Mammoth. All I can say is all hail the mighty DS, the in-car DVD player, and he who shall henceforth be known as Mr. Bean, for without whom a 5 1/2 hour car ride with a 3 y/old and 7 y/old would have otherwise been unbearable.

We left around 9am and ended up stopping at a McDonalds in Lone Pine for a late lunch, and this was the view from our window...

The trip was fairly uneventful, although the kids kept asking "Is that The Mountain?" every time a new mountain covered in snow came into view.

The trip was also made easier by the acquisition of the In-laws' GPS/navigator, which the kids thought was funny when I changed the voice from a tinny American woman to a rather cultured sounding English lady. Then I changed the car from a sedan to a monster truck but that was about the limit of the customizing I could do. The GPS did try to do some strange things, like take us via the Angeles Forest Hwy. Sure it's 20 miles shorter, but we don't save a heck of a lot of time going that way. In fact after we drove past the recommended turn off and the nice English lady realized we didn't want to take the high road and recalculated our route, our ETA was adjusted by just 5 minutes.

The GPS also made it easy finding our cabin when we arrived at Mammoth Lakes and we were pleasantly surprised to find we were about 5 minutes from both the center of town, and from the mountain's lower lodge where we were booked for our skiing lessons. The GPS also made it somewhat easy to find the upper lodge when we needed to drop off our daughter at daycare. Yup, we spent the day skiing while our youngest spent the day in daycare.

After a huge mix-up that's probably fairly typical of most family's first day at the snow, we dropped JE at his Skiing class then Liz & I found our instructor. About an hour or so later our small class was broken up into two smaller classes and Liz and I went our separate ways. Despite having been skiing just once before, 15 years ago, I'd retained enough skills to move up into the novice group, while Liz remained in the beginner's group with a white guy who fell over and cried a lot, and a black guy who also fell over a lot then quit.

When one of the guys in my group lost his poles our Instructor informed us we didn't really need them, and he made us all leave our poles at the chair lift. With no poles we had to concentrate more on the skis so we probably did get better, faster, and by the end of the day we were skiing Blue Square runs and dodging trees.

By the end of the day Liz's feet and my legs were killing me. Liz's feet because her boots were a shade too small, and my legs because I'd mistakenly tucked the inner lining of my ski pants into my boots, and the clips chewed the hell out of my shins and calves.

Expecting the worst Liz stopped by JE's class and was surprised to find him having a blast and skiing like he'd been doing it for years. When Liz saw some toddlers learning to ski, who were clearly younger than our daughter, she decided that next year we'd all go skiing; no more daycare.

Finally, I leave you with a picture of the view looking out the back door of our cabin.