Stephen and I made it back from skiing at Whistler-Blackcomb okay--kind of. The trip out went perfect. First class to DEN then tourist to Vancouver. The only problem was the counter person at MCO (Orlando Airport) questioned whether I had proper ID for Stephen to enter Canada. I just had an Identikid card and a notarized permission from his parents to take him out of the country. She thought I needed his birth certificate. That worried me all the way out there and kind of ruined the flight. I made calls from the Airphone to have Bodie round up the birth certificate and be ready to have it faxed to me in Denver, or Vancouver if Canada rejected us. It turned out the card was fine with both Canadian and US immigration so my worrying was for naught. I had the birth certificate faxed out to the hotel just in case we couldn't get back in the US.

Coming back the last day we skied until 1115 and caught the 1300 Perimeter Express bus which made record time down to the airport arriving at 1545....only to find out that our 1745 flight to LAX was delayed until 1930. We had no problem getting a seat on that one. We arrived in LAX at 2210 and raced to the adjacent terminal to catch the 2225 flight to MCO. Of course we didn't make it by a couple of minutes as they had just closed the gates and backed out, but they were sweet enough to say,"Oh yes, there were a couple of empty seats on it". UAL was actually very helpful explaining our options to get home and we decided to try the 2359 flight to Dulles although it was overbooked. We tried it because the morning flts from DC (IAD) to MCO looked good while the LAX ones were overbooked and we had nowhere else to go anyway. Stephen fell hard asleep on a bench while we waited the next hour. I had about given up when they called us up to the counter and we got the last two seats on the plane, and in Economy Plus (extra legroom). Stephen was so asleep I barely got him onto his feet and on the plane. Later he had no memory of boarding and thought we were in Orlando when we landed in Washington. We caught the 0915 flight out of DC to Orlando with no problem. Most surprisingly our luggage arrived on the same flight. I had totally kissed it off thinking they'd just ship it to Orlando on the first direct flight from LAX the next morning.. Somehow they kept track of my luggage and all of my permutations and got the bags on the flight to DC and then to Orlando.

It is really stressful waiting and wondering whether you'll get on a standby flight especially that late at night with a young one in tow. As soon as the gate agents arrived they started asking for volunteers to give up their seats for free tickets so I was sure we were stuck. With Stephen snoozing on the bench , I had decided to just stay in the terminal if we missed the DC plane since we'd have to be back about 0500 anyway. Thankfully we caught that plane to Washington, DC getting the last two seats. Several paid customers obviously didn't show up and a whole bunch from the standby list also didn't show. Stephen was no trouble at all and good company for me the whole trip.

I decided to have one last fling at skiing for 2001 because Yvonne had gone to Sweden to visit her Mom and I was bored at home alone. Stephen's teacher had no objection to his missing school saying he would learn more there with me than in school for a few days. She provided some work for him to do each day after skiing. Many of Yvonne's friends expressed amazement that a grandfather would take a child on a trip without a woman to take care of things. Talk about chauvenistic!

We got a hotel room at the Best Western Listel Lodge right in Whistler Village about one hundred yards from the gondolas to Whistler and Blackcomb. The exchange rate really helped us out. The room was only US$62, Stephen's ski rental with the best gear available was only about US$25 for four days. The lift tickets averaged about US$35 per day for me and less for Stephen compared to up to $60 at Vail, Snowmass, Park City. Food prices particularly up on the slopes seemed reasonable.

Skiing was strange. The first day we had about a foot of fresh heavy snow, not powder. It was really tiring to ski in it. I was pooped and my thighs really burned. The next three days were crystal clear and too warm, but the views of the mountains were spectacular. The snow would start out groomed hard as asphalt and icy, gradually soften up for awhile and then become slush.. One run in particular had a fantastic transformation during the day. the Saddle is about the highest run on Whistler. We were first on it one morning and it was perfectly smooth for our first tracks. We did a few runs on it and then went to other runs. Later we went back to the Saddle and now as the snow softened and more skiers carved their turns it created three foot tall bumps covering the whole hill. We had a good time but it wasn't great conditions. Even up on top at 7th Heaven (Blackcomb) and the Peak chair (Whistler) it got mushy by about noon. We alternated the two mountains, skiing Whistler one day and Blackcomb the next. On both mountains we stayed as high in the alpine as we could since the best snow conditions were at the highest altitudes. At the end of the day we had to ride the gondola down to the Village because there was virtually no snow at the base. It was tee shirt weather down in the Village.

I actually think the nine year old has now passed me up in his skiing skills. He is very darn good. He skis fast but under control with perfect balance using perfect parallel technique. And the energy level difference between a nine year old and a sixty year old is immense. I hadn't realized that I was getting older until watching the normal activities of a kid. He'd ski all day without all of my rest stops every hundred yards or so to get my breath and ease the pain in my thighs, then want me to throw the football to him for an hour. Then he'd make me take him to a creek where he would move forty tons of stone trying to dam up the creek and bounded up and down the rocks for another couple of hours. And we spent an hour in the hotel pool and hot tub playing more vigorous games. He doesn't know the words stiff and sore. We both managed to fall asleep easily at the end ot the day.

He ate well, but it seemed everything he liked was priced "market price". Expensive tastes! We had snowcrab legs, prime rib, beef ribs and pizza for dinner and ate soups and sandwiches on the mountain for lunch. Breakfast was cereal in the hotel room.