Winter Vacation in Bend

I hesitate to call this a real vacation. I just noticed that Sarah had four days off in a row, and we thought it would be fun to go somewhere with snow, since we don't have any. We tried Timberline Lodge on Mt. Hood, but they only had openings for one night. So we decided on Bend.

We made one dumb decision right off the bat, and that was picking the wrong room. The place we're staying had these nifty spa rooms and we thought the kids would get a kick out of having a mini pool in the room. Turns out they weren't quite what we thought; moreso a two-person jetted tub than a real hot tub. The bottoms were molded into seats, so they weren't really anything either of the kids could have stood on very well. Also, it took up most of the extra space in the room. (We'd turned down getting a two room suite for this.)

By the time we checked in and realized we'd screwed up, there weren't any suites left, so we switched to a slightly bigger room with a queen and a murphy bed. The only issue is that we're sharing the room with both kids, so basically we have to go to bed the same time as them. At 8. Unless we stay up and stare at the walls.

The focal point of our trip was going to be fun in the snow; specifically, tubing. The big ski resort near Bend has a tubing run. After some poking around online, I found that there was a winter snow park in the National Forest near here that had a sledding hill they'd just finished building. We thought that might be a better choice to start with before spending $60 or so for all of us to go tubing for 2 hours.

Good thing, too, since Ian went down the hill once and was done. This was after probably 20 minutes of getting dressed and a twenty minute car ride. For about twenty seconds of excitement. Noah, as can be seen in the pictures, was stuffed into snow gear a la the kid from Christmas Story, such that he could barely move. He seemed semi content just to lay comatose in the sled while we pulled him and Ian around.

The first day we convinced Ian to go down the slope at the very bottom of the hill a few times, but that was it. We did the entire thing again Friday morning, and this time he didn't want to go at all. The kids were pulled back and forth for ten minutes or so while Sarah and I went down the hill a couple of times.

We made the mistake of buying hard plastic toboggan type sleds instead of something inflatable. On Thursday I tried a laying on my stomach. Big, big mistake. Without a foot thick cushion of air, every little bump hurt. Not to mention the big ones. I hit one right when I was right at the bottom of the hill that slammed my ribcage back into my spine. I whacked my jaw something awful, too. It's a good thing I had my teeth clenched otherwise I might have bitten off my tongue.

Anyway, we've come to the conclusion that we need a lot more work before we're good at outdoor winter sports.