Adventure Starts Here.
Every journey brings you closer to new places, to people you love, to family, and to yourself. Let’s make your next escape unforgettable.
There are all the other kids onboard (more than a million children cruise every year, reports the Cruise Lines International Association, more than 1,000 on each Disney ship) and organized kids’ and teen activities from morning until night. “You’ll find a friend on the first day,” promises Brooke Abzug, 10, who likes the shipboard scavenger hunts staged by the kids’ clubs.
What are you waiting for? Spring Break is looming and you haven’t planned a getaway. We’re not talking a Big Trip — a cruise, for example, or an adventure trip to Costa Rica, though, according to Travelzoo.com, there are good last-minute deals to be had in Costa Rica.
I just got back from New Orleans and it was packed with spring breakers. They were doing their share of drinking on Bourbon Street but they were also doing their share of helping to clear debris and build houses in neighborhoods that still have not rebounded nearly three years after Hurricane Katrina.
A gem of a mountain (no lift lines here!) just minutes on a free, festively painted shuttle bus from the tiny (less than 2,500 people) town of Mt. Crested Butte, so steeped in mining history that most of the downtown area, with its wooden, multicolored, 19th-century buildings, is on the National Register of Historic Places. (Ever see a two-story outhouse?)
We’re in family ski trip mode. Everyone having a big bacon and eggs breakfast in pajamas. A lot of teasing is afoot. Thirteen year old Eva decides she’ll ski with us rather than go to ski school. We’re all impressed at how well she skis.
Mel seems to be rebounding from her fall and disappointment during the Junior Extremes qualifying run down a terrifyingly steep slope. Everyone has been telling her it’s a lot better to give your all than to not try. That she didn’t succeed just goes with the territory. It helps when she learns a lot of other kids fell on the same run.
All Mel wants is to qualify, which means skiing in control down what looks to me like a sheer cliff studded with rocks and boulders! Only about half of the teens who are here will actually qualify.
It’s a perfect blue sky day. The sun is shining…the snow crisp under our snowshoes. There’s hardly anyone else out on the trail — just a few other snow shoers and Nordic skiers with their dogs, and an occasional snow mobiler. We see the tracks where hardy skiers have come to back country ski, hiking up so they can ski down pristine powder.
It wasn’t the choice of restaurant that was making me so happy this particular Saturday night. It was that we’d survived a day of college touring in Boston without a melt down, without stalking off a campus, without tears and with everyone still speaking-and even more surprising, smiling.
The first phase is the new Lodge at Mountaineer Square and the Mountaineer Conference Center where we’re staying, just steps from the lifts.
The lodge and conference center wrap around a cozy courtyard, in which guests can find visitor services, dining and shopping. Here the Crested Butte Adventure Center serves as the “resort concierge,” a one-stop shopping venue.
Organized chaos. Three adults, four college kids, two teens, and a five year-old and three year-old getting ready for a ski day. I‘ve got a sinus infection so I opt not to ski today. I take 13-year-old Eva to the “teen” class. Ellen Osterling, who oversees the kids’ programs, says the ski school tries to offer teen classes every day — even if they have to send out a teen with his own instructor.
We’re heading to Crested Butte Mountain Resort in Colorado to meet up with an assortment of family, all staying at a condo in the spanking new Lodge at Mountaineer Square, which is part of the hundreds of millions of dollars of improvements here.
Even better, no more soggy hotdogs or lukewarm mac and cheese for lunch and no more putting kids on the chairlift with strangers: the entire class can ride up with their instructor on a six-passenger chairlift and eat together on the mountain. The teens and tweens, of course, will love the parks and pipes and the night skiing this resort is famous for.
Five years is too long between vacations. Just ask Amy and Matt Wilcher. The Ohio couple hasn’t had a vacation since their Caribbean honeymoon five years ago. Now that they’re parents, they’re contemplating an entirely different kind of getaway with their 2-year-old daughter
The Utah Olympic Park was the venue for Nordic jumping, bobsled, luge and skeleton events during the 2002 Winter Olympics here. Today, world class athletes train here — you may see them if you visit Tuesday through Saturday. They train in summer as well as winter. Today the Park also continues to serve as a year-round competition site.
Let’s hear it for a place that loves families. “We want to make it easier for them,” says The Canyons Ski School Director Barry Stout. He notes that the “Cat’s “ program for 4-6 year olds not only is one stop shopping but guarantees a 3:1 ratio. There are three terrain parks and six natural half pipes as well as plenty of hike-to terrain for those craving the steeps and the deeps.
Welcome to Antonin Gaudi’s unfinished masterpiece, the Sagrada Familia, www.sagradafamilia.org , Barcelona’s most famous site and Spain’s most visited. More than 40 years after the eccentric and revered architect’s death – he was struck by a tram – work still continues on the huge church first begun in 1882. Some 2.5 million people visited last year.
Holly, a single mom of three, was an Olympian and World Cup champion. She skied on the US Ski team for 10 years. She raced from the time she was eight until her late 20s. But she knows that most of the women who sign up for her clinic aren’t world class athletes.
For me, it’s later in the afternoon at the top of a gnarly, bumpy steep run called Grizzly. I can’t figure out where in the bump to turn. I’m afraid to point my skies downhill. It’s so steep! The bumps are so big! But I square my shoulders and say I’m not going to let the mountain defeat me.
I’m nervous. The rest of the women in the room are excited and upbeat. We’ve gathered from around the country on this very snowy morning at The Canyons resort in Park City Utah to work on our skiing with former Olympian Holly Flanders and her hand-picked crew of women’s coaches.