Given that our (4.5-yr-old) daughter still has this week off from school and that so many of the people with whom I normally correspond are also still off this week, I decided to take some vacation hours yesterday morning and head up with the little one to Bolton Valley for a brief ski. It's only about a 30-minute drive from Burlington and it's quite a nice little ski area. It was very bizarre, though, to think about skiing when you were leaving Burlington at 7:45am with the temperature already at 45 degrees F and with green grass all around! They'd been making snow and when the lifts started at 9am we were there on the practice slope with the rope tow. A couple of runs there and one run off the mid-mountain lift and this Dad and kid were ready for a break... I suddenly remembered from last year how brutally exhausting it is to snowplow all the way down a slope holding someone else in front of you! The snow was great, though, and we had a lot of fun. It was just strange to have it be so incredibly warm.... felt like we were skiing at the end of the season rather than the beginning!

Tags: bolton valley, skiing, vermont