Boyne Highlands Ski Trip

This past weekend we went to Boyne Highlands on a ski trip. The UT Alumni Association sponsored a weekend up there that was really inexpensive so we couldn't resist. We left Friday morning and stayed through Sunday around noon. It's about a 5 1/2 hour trip each way as it's up at the very northern tip of the Michigan mitten. Syd snowboarded on Friday night and Sunday morning, but skied all day Saturday (and I mean all day - we started around 10:30 AM and ended around 8:30 PM with a lunch/dinner break somewhere in the middle). Syd and Dad swam in the heated outdoor pool Saturday night.

It was a great weekend to go skiing. It wasn't really cold and we had fresh powder on Friday and Saturday, as it was snowing both days. We had a lot of fun and would love to go again. It's a great ski resort.

Below are some videos of Syd skiing. The first one is from relatively early in the day - around 1:00 PM (when she still had the sit down method of stopping) and the second is from later in the day - around 8:30 PM (when she slowed way down and then just skied into the railings for the carpet to take her back up). In the second one you can hear Mom saying "start your pizza." We learned this last year watching the ski classes at Whiteface Mountain, and it was reinforced at Boyne where they used the same lingo. Basically they teach kids to ski by using "french fries" and "pizza". The french fries are when the skis are parallel and you want to be moving and pizza is when you use the skis in a v shape, like a snowplow, to slow down or stop. It seems to work for Syd so we went with it. It's funny, in one of the videos we have (not in the blog) you can hear Dad saying the word pizza about 10 times, each time a little louder and with more panic.

There are a lot of people in this first video, but you can spot Syd coming from the right, near the little building, in her turquoise coat. As you can see, the cones are still up from the classes and Syd is practicing going back and forth between them. The hill is pretty busy... and these are the easy hills.



In this video the hills have really thinned out, probably because it was getting close to 9:00 PM and that's when the lifts stop running. As you can see, Syd has the one side of the hill all to herself (well, except for Mom following and Dad filming).