
Tuesday was Matthew's day off, and serendipitously, it was also $1o Tuesday at Wolf Mountain. We had been wanting to go snowboarding with Tommy since before Christmas, and we picked a great day to do it. The snow was really good, and Matt and I only paid $33 for the two of us for 8 hours! Wahoo!

This was my first experience with powder, and I could not believe the difference it made. I've been snowboarding a couple of times, but the conditions were icy and rainy. Now I know that powder is preferable. Not only is it a lot of fun to ride on, but it's much more comfortable for beginners (aka: me) when they fall. The one downside of all that fluffy snow, in my limited experience, is it takes a lot more energy to get out of a pile of soft stuff than to simply stand up. It caused a minor problem for me when I fell about 7 times within a minute on a run directly below the lift. After a while I heard a voice from above call down to me, "just stand up and lean back!" Although that is what I had been trying to do for the past 60 seconds, I still appreciated his suggestion, because 1) it was encouraging, in all my exhaustion, to know that somebody was rooting for me, and 2) it gave me the opportunity to imagine what I looked like flopping around from a bird's eye view. Very entertaining.
And three cheers for my husband and my brother for being so patient with me. They did a great job of helping me learn. Tommy in particular was a great snowboarding teacher because he was very meticulous about making his student to the same thing over and over. And I think in spite of my slowness, the boys still got in some good runs and had a fun time. Now I can (sort of) carve, and I still managed to get a great quad workout from riding the heel edge of my board for the first half of the afternoon. Great day!