A couple of weekends ago, Sean's work held a conference up in Kolasin, Montenegro, a ski resort town. We were planning on going as a family, but a couple of hours before we left, a friend offered to watch Asher so we could have a weekend to ourselves. After hemming and hawing over the decision (we hadn't been away from him yet!), we decided to take her up on her generous offer and drive the six hours to our weekend getaway. While I did have a little break down before we left, and periodically throughout the beginning of the drive, once we got going and I became distracted, I was able to be more at ease with leaving my little boy at home. It was a long windy (there was wind and the road also curved a lot) trip there, but well worth it!
Our Hotel - The Bianca Resort
Our Room - Very Nice :)
We got in pretty late, and after dinner we decided to relax and see what was on TV. As we were flipping through the stations, we found the one below! Look there's a camera in the pool room! And anyone can watch you, live! Hahaha. Kinda sketchy if you ask me!
View from our room...
While Sean was in his conference, I was left all to my lonesome! I could do whatever I wanted with my time. It was amazing! I took advantage of the spa and got a massage. Then after joining Sean for lunch, I went out into the little town and explored the winter wonderland. And it was gorgeous!
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| I swiped this picture from one of our friends who went with us. |
And arrived at the ski lodge before it was open. Beautiful!
As we waited in "line" for our equipment, and for all you who understand that pretty much everywhere else in the world except the States, and probably Western Europe, people don't do lines! Sooooo annoying! This is definitely one thing that I have struggled with while in Albania. You want to elbow the grannies who step in front of you and push you out of the way. So, we ended up waiting, yelling, and vying for the peoples' attention in the veritable mosh pit of people, for about 45 minutes. One of the first things we found out was that they don't have ski boots that fit the big feet of most of the guys we came with! When I say big feet I mean anything over size 11. And we got there early, so they must not have men with big feet in the Balkans! Frustrating!! They did have the right size in snowboarding boots though! So we decided, snowboarding it was! We signed on with an instructor who didn't really speak any English, oops!, and tried our hardest to learn how to snowboard. Hahahahaha.
Before....
During....
"What am I doing here," "This is miserable," "My butt is going to be so sore tomorrow."
And when it was over, we asked the instructor which slope we should try. And to make a long story short, after a stumbling, halting conversation, we were pretty much told that: No, he would not be a good instructor or a responsible human being if he told us we could go down any of the slopes. Hahahaha. That's about how badly we all did as we were trying to learn. But we were determined to make the most of the day.
We looked at the runs to see which would be easiest, and well...they all looked pretty darn hard! We learned afterwards that the color coding goes something like this...green, yellow, blue, purple, red, black - from easy to hard. Apparently, these slopes at this resort are only purple, red, black.....I realized why our instructor was somewhat skeptical about us going down any of them! After looking, we decided on trying one slope out. It was the one with the tow line that drags you up the mountain (the short little run on the far lower left).
We were all ready to go up, though a little worried since we didn't see any other snowboarders attempting it. I decided to try it first, and this was the result....
Falling and being dragged up the mountain! I was ready to be pulled up the mountain on my bum, but the guy stopped the tow and told me to come back down. I tried again, but the result was the same...Me flat on my face with the rest of the group dying laughing :)
Then Sean tried....
Then another one of our friends.... (Notice Sean and myself doubled over in laughter at the bottom)
And before any more of us tried, we decided this probably wasn't going to happen. Hahaha. But two of us were determined to make a go at one of the runs. "Two of us" would be me and a friend. Sean became very self aware early on about his balance issues and recognized that he had already fulfilled his snowboarding potential on the bunny slant (not slope) and he went down to the lodge. He drank hot cocoa and got permanent damage to his hearing as he attempted to tolerate the hardcore, live Montenegrin rappers that the lodge felt added to the atmosphere. Gotta love the Balkans.
While my friend and I chose a run and went on up!
Yeah...not very steep, right???
And off we went.....
And down we went! :)
But we persevered, and got right back up, and tried again! Well, it was more like this... we snowboarded some, fell some, sat a little more than some while we mapped out how we could survive the next 20 feet :) We sat, wondered what the heck we were thinking, and then contemplated which way at the many splits was our purple run as opposed to the red or black run. :) hehe
I'm not sure how long we were on that mountain, but we made it down! And I have to say that the last part of the run (the part that would have been where we got off if we were successful on the tow line that we almost put out of commission) was FANTASTIC!! Both of us flew down, and loved it!!! If only we had made it up that stupid rope tow!
We made it!!!
A little bedraggled, but in one piece, except for a couple bruised ribs on my friend's part :)
The run we did was the purple line that started on the top right, went all the way diagonally left, and ended in the bottom middle.
Good times, good times :)
After a fun filled couple of days, we headed back home to our sweet little boy. Next time, if there is a next time, while snowboarding was an adventure, we will make sure they have ski boots in our sizes!
