I spent the last week in Telluride, Colorado and in a few days I leave for a short trip to southern California. And so it seems I'm spending my winter break like a true student squeezing in days of work in between vacations.
Telluride. A town that is amazingly dog-friendly, puppy parking and poop bag dispensers galore, and deeply rooted in the Wild West. Its bars are dark, atmospheric places that smell like dirt and mesquite with tall, white-haired men in cowboy hats that mingle through the thin crowd. It's the town where Butch Cassidy and his gang robbed their first bank. Where that bank stood is a newer stone bank converted into a fashionable clothing store named Two Skirts with the latest Marc Jacobs adorning the mannequin in the window.
The mountains are breathtaking, literally. Upon arrival, we found ourselves winded after a flight of stairs, a slight upward incline in the road, the effort to lace up our boots. Ten thousand feet in the air on main street then another 2500 feet after a ride on a gondola and several lifts to the top of one of the mountains.
The sky was all blue. The sun ten thousand feet closer to my skin than normal and making itself known. After one run I wished that I had left off either my thermal or my fleece back in the room.
We rode three days straight with barely the energy to shower and go to dinner at the end of the day. The fourth day my friends left and I rested. On the fifth day I was out on the slopes again, this time with my sister and her friend Lori -- part two of the trip.
It was different. I missed traveling in a pack of snowboarders. But my new companions promised a different, less insular kind of fun. They were intent on drinking. They pshawed the altitude warning of abstaining from alcohol and caffeine for at least 24 hours and on their first night we went to The Sheridan Bar to sip cocktails in the low light and mesquite aroma. We met a group of guys, only one of whom we caught the name of and talked about the conditions, the weather, the mountains we'd been to before.
The rest of the nights went on like that. So did the rest of the afternoons, my sister and her friend taking full advantage of apres-ski in as many venues as possible. By Saturday my back was aching from five days of twisting my board down mogul fields, launching myself off of jumps and digging into a few inches of fresh-layed powder. I was ready to go home. My boyfriend and dog were waiting.
What I was not ready for was a one-hour wait to get my baggage at Newark airport. But that's an entry not worth writing.
