White Christmas And Then Some..., by Rick Ackerman

January 4th, 2007 Price: Subscribe »

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White Christmas
And Then Some...

For edition of January 02, 2007

Happy New Year and warm greetings from Colorado, the snow capital of America! (with apologies to subscribers from Buffalo). I high-tailed it home from Vail a couple of days earlier than planned, since I didn’t want to risk getting stuck in the mountains, estranged from my wife and kids, on New Year’s Eve. I’d left her with the more snow-worthy of our two cars, but she decided not to come up as planned, fearing she’d get stuck in traffic. It might have been much worse than that for her, since, around mid-day, the interstate was closed to westbound traffic about 20 miles shy of the Eisenhower Tunnel. I was headed in the other direction, white-knuckling my way past some spinouts and spectacular accidents on I-70. One involved about 15 cars, quite a few of them spectacularly mangled.

A few days earlier, on my way up to Vail, I got stuck in a snowy ditch myself when dropping my younger son at a friend’s ski house near Breckinridge. My car, a front-wheel drive Nissan with regular tires, got so deeply wedged in snow when it spun out on a turn that I thought it might sit there till spring. A friendly guy in a big Chevy pulled me out, though, and I was on my way after just an hour’s delay.

Flying Smart

I was able to spend only a few days in Vail, but the skiing was great. Blizzard #1 somehow managed to bypass the mountain resorts, but there was plenty of cover on the trails that I skied, including China Basin and Blue Sky. I skied with my best buddy and his teenage daughter. His outbound flight (from New Jersey) had been canceled like everyone else’s, but he instinctually and quickly rebooked passage to Phoenix (not Albuquerque as I’d mentioned earlier) and drove to Vail from there. On Wednesday, with a second storm threatening, he changed his itinerary once again, so that instead of returning via Denver, he was on a Vail-to-Charlotte-to-New Jersey flight. The lesson for me was that experienced fliers can be very resourceful in avoiding the sometimes cruel caprices of weather and the airlines that so challenge the rest of us.

While in Vail, I also got to visit with my friends Chas and Charmaine Bernhardt. He’d given her a pair of ski-boot warmers for Christmas and was busy that night fitting them into boots that already had custom-made arch supports. Precision-cutting the wires and warming pads into the orthotic lifts so that they would not cause her even the slightest discomfort was a project for which Chas is very well qualified. A perfectionist, he is known in and around Vail for custom woodwork of the very highest quality. Quite a bit of his expertise and fastidiousness went into making these boots suitable, even, for the princess who could feel a pea through 27 mattresses. His labor of love paid off the very next day, since he and his wife had won, in a charity raffle, the rare privilege of a 7 a.m. run, on untracked powder, from Vail’s magisterial heights.

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London Seminar Firming

A Hidden Pivot seminar in London appears likely, judging from the strong initial response. If you’re interested in attending a two-day class there, probably sometime in the spring of 2007, please let me know via e-mail, including your contact information. The cost would be $1,500 USD.