We're getting a little better...not much

Saturday we decided we would head to Pine Valley to practice our cross country skiing skills. (We don't have many.) We have watched the library video a few more times now. It was a perfect sunny, crisp day up there. There were quite a few people there - a scout troop finishing up a winter camp out, crazy kids tubing off the dam and even someone with a tent set up to ice fish out on the lake. Lucky for us someone else had been there cc skiing and left us some nice tracks to follow. (In case you don't know, on groomed trails, they put tracks in for people to use. It makes it a lot easier than just having to push through brand new snow.) We decided to head up to the end of the road to where the new camp grounds are being put in. It's kind of uphill, so pretty soon we were shedding some of our layers. It's a real work out. Here and there we fell over. When we got to the top we went over to the stream and up the trail a for a little while. We had to go up a hill to what we thought was the main trail and let me tell you, the herring bone just wasn't cutting it so we just went up it sideways planting our skis as we went. Paul thought it was so funny watching me that he took a movie, but luckily he didn't do it right and only caught seconds of my clumsiness on video. We went off on what looked like a trail for quite some time, but found that it must be the ditch that heads off towards the cabins by the cemetery. We backtracked until we found a pretty open space to head back down the hill to the road we came up on. If getting up the hill was hilarious, going down was even more so. Snowplow just wasn't cutting it, so we resorted to the sideways ski method again and stair-stepped and fell our way to the bottom. Four or five crashes later, we made it back to the road. Thank goodness those other skiers were no where in sight for all of our antics. We did so much better going back down the road and even started getting some real speed and gliding into it...then we would fall down. I'm afraid we aren't too well coordinated yet. Even with all the crashing, it was still fun and so beautiful and lots of exercise. I have some sore muscles and a few bruises, but I learned a lot about better ways to get up when you crash. We finished up by eating lunch in the car and then walking across the dam to watch the crazy sledders and see the frozen lake. On the far side of the lake we were so pleased to see tracks of the other skiers crossing the overflow area of the dam and going up the other side using the sideways method we had been using. Hey, maybe we aren't so dumb after all. They didn't show that method in our video, but we figured it out on our own. After we got home, we were so tired out we had to take a nap. Then we did our Costco run and stopped in to the the first day of the art show at the college. They have some wonderful paintings as usual. Be sure to get there. We will probably head back up to Pine Valley on Monday for a few more chills and spills.