This past Saturday I went to Chestnut Mountain, the finest ski resort in all of Illinois with my Mother, Son, and Neil. Lift tickets were only $2.
I was sick on Friday and still felt lousy on Saturday, but that was no reason to change plans. The kid was so excited. How could I disappoint him?
We got off to great start with me forgetting to put the boy's boots in the van. Luckily, we discovered this in Elgin, so we made a quick run back to pick them up and we were off. We didn't get there until almost 1pm and it was 1:30 until we were ready to make our first turns. We made our way over to Rookie's Ridge where this video was shot:
http://renegadesrendezvous.com/video/CM.wmv.
It was sunny, but a strong wind was blowing up off the Mississippi River and it was bitterly cold. I did my best to reduce the wind noise in the video, but some of it is pretty loud. The boy did a great job on the skis, and did very well riding the chairlift. He only failed to get on the chair once, and we never had a problem getting off. After we were out for about 1 1/2 hours we went in to warm up with some hot cocoa. The boy and I changed into our snowboard boots and went back to tackle the ridge on the boards.
He did pretty good for the first couple of runs, but then he started to fall and have problems. He was saying things like, "how do you stop this thing?" and "I'm going too fast!" He also had difficulty looking where he wanted to go... a recipe for certain disaster. Fortunately the beginner chairlift broke down after our 4th run on the snowboards, so we packed up and got ready to go. I sent the boy off with my Mom and then Neil and I went to take a real run.
Neil and I were together near the end, so I went around to wait in the lift line, but Neil never showed up. I went back to look for him and he made it after 5 or 6 minutes. The story he tells is that some kid cut him off and he took a digger on his face. So we go wait in line and then this little girl starts shrieking, "you're bleeding!" Sure enough, when he fell, he cut his nose and a flap of skin was hanging off. Eeew. We used some tissues and direct pressure to stop the bleeding on the ride up and got a butterfly bandage in the lodge to hold the skin together.
We rolled on home, stopping at Culver's on the way to enjoy a butterburger and their delicious root beer. We all slept well that evening, with peaceful dreams of winter snow.
Ride Report - Chestnut 12/2 
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