We spent this past week skiing in Vail, Colorado. Vail has a special meaning to me because my family took annual ski trips here since I was 12 years old. I have wonderful memories from those ski vacations. Dave was our ski instructor every year. We used to end the ski day at a bar at the bottom of the mountain listening to live music and eating nachos. The first year I met Michael he came with us on our last ski trip to Vail.
It has been 17 years since we have been back and it has changed a lot, but so much of it is familiar. Vail is much more developed. The number of condos and other buildings that have popped up is staggering, but the ski slopes are the same. We had fun skiing on Lost Boy in Game Creek Bowl and doing jumps in the terrain park. Warming up with hot chocolate was a must on the colder days.
Vail is vast. It is the biggest mountain we have been to so far. It is great for all levels of skiers. There are plenty of nice, easy green runs, but also a lot of challenging blues, black and double black diamonds. Vail does require a lot of traversing on catwalks. We got a good arm workout pushing ourselves along the catwalks. 
On our second day of skiing, Henry and I split off from Lucas and Michael. I thought Henry and I were going to go ski some nice easy green runs, but he told me he wanted to ski a double black diamond. We are always encouraging our kids to challenge themselves, so I did not say no. We headed to the run called Highline. It took us almost an hour to make it down. The moguls are as big as Henry. He did it and the smile on his face was priceless. Lucas wouldn’t be outdone and when he heard what Henry did he had to do it too.
We had plans to ski four days in a row, but after day two we hit a wall. Henry was sore from skiing Highline. Lucas was sore from racing down mogul runs all day in the back bowls. We took Wednesday off to rest. We have skied 18 days this month. We are having a blast, but that is a lot of skiing for people who do not normally ski.
We also had a mission while in Vail to get my dad some Vail t-shirts. He has two Vail t-shirts that he loves to wear and they are falling apart. I could not find the same shirts from over 20 years ago, but we found a couple of good replacements.
We all enjoyed skiing at Vail. I enjoyed all of the memories that came flooding back as I skied the mountain and walked around the town.
