Impetuously, we decided on a quick ski trip to Taos, New Mexico this weekend, a five-hour drive through mostly unforgiving and vacant eastern New Mexico, attractive mainly to vagrant space aliens.
We left at four Saturday morning, brutally early, and made good time to the town of Red River, which is where the omniscient Google Maps led us. From there we were supposed to take a small road directly through the Rockies to the Taos Ski Valley, but once we actually found the road and spent a few minutes trying to get the van past the first ten feet of ice covered gravel and dirt, we figured that wasn't the road for us. Maybe the Donner party, but not for us.
So we had to take the long way around, following the Enchanted Circle, dropping down to Taos, and then over to the ski valley. We weren't too, too late, so the kids still were able to spend a full day learning to snowboard. I did discover, however, that arriving in the mountains, in the middle of January, with only tennis shoes, jeans, a t-shirt, and a micron-thin cotton hoodie is not a good plan. So while everyone else was cheering it up, all cozy and ruddy in their thick coats of warmy goodness, I trudged around, entirely frozen from top to bottom, thinking fondly of my forgotten winter coat that I had left back home.
Since skiing is the last thing I was interested in (my platypus feet, completely flat and archless don't cooperate with skis and ski boots), my plan was to hang out at the lodge in front of a roaring fire while I thought Deep and Important thoughts, such as: Where's the hot chocolate? That plan changed a little toward the end of the day when we found out Alex had broken his wrist during snowboard lessons.
I say 'broken' although the doctors called it a fracture, but a break by any other name is still a break, so the ski doctors took some x-rays and wound up his hand tightly is a quasi-cast, our instructions being to get a more thorough examination once we were back home.
So the next day, while Colleen and Megan finished the second part of snowboarding school, and Suzanne hit the slopes, Alex and I hung around, watched too much of Ben 10 on the Cartoon Network, and played some marathon bumper pool.
And then we got the word that Megan had fractured her wrist in exactly the same spot Alex did.
This confounded the doctors, who took a couple of different x-rays to make sure the kids didn't have some anomalous, weird bone structure. But in the end, the breaks were simple coincidences, identical snaps but on different arms. The doctor said he'd put both kids in real casts if we wanted to keep skiing (what!), but we told him we were on the way home.
So home we went. It was a long drive along a lonely road in the middle of nowhere, punctuated by roadside signs that told us, "Police Everywhere!" On one stretch of 80 miles, I saw just two cars, and a couple of times I did the old wanna-see-something-scary routine by turning off the headlights for a second or two. Actually, that was tremendously scary, so I quickly stopped doing that stupid thing.
When we got home after midnight we found it colder in Amarillo than anytime we were skiing. A sign at a nearby bank flashed 10, but with the wind chill it felt more like -5 degrees, and our entire neighborhood was dusted with a thin layer of snow.
Too bad there's no skiing here. But I'm sure if I run out onto driveway as fast as I can, I'll slip and break a few of my own bones. It'll be just like old times in New Mexico!
