The Vacation I Planned vs. The Vacation I Needed…
It wasn’t the vacation I planned, but it was the vacation I needed.
The plan was simple: spend a week skiing in Utah.
A week happened.
Utah happened.
Skiing… happened exactly one day.
This winter, snow totals were historically low, and temperatures were historically high, which is not the ideal combination if your vacation plan involves sliding down a mountain on frozen water at high speed.
We flew in on Saturday with another couple and celebrated my birthday with a nice dinner that was nice. (Yes, that sentence is redundant, but that’s how nice it was. Also, birthday dinners automatically get upgraded a letter grade.)
The next day, the woman in the couple flew to Florida for work, but her husband stayed behind to ski with me. We headed to Snowbird knowing the conditions weren’t great.
And they weren’t.
But they also weren’t quite as bad as we feared.
We quickly learned the strategy for the day: ski the side of the mountain that had sun in the morning, then move across the mountain as the sun moved across the sky. Without the sun, the slopes were ice. Not “a little firm.” Ice. The kind where your skis make that scraping sound that tells you gravity is now fully in charge.
In other words: very Midwest skiing.
With the sun, the ice softened… but with the heat, it softened quickly. There was about a fifteen-minute window where the snow was perfect—right between “dangerous skating rink” and “wet cement.”
After a few hours, we looked at each other and came to the obvious conclusion:
This was our one and only ski day.
Fortunately, because we have a place out there, we were well prepared to pivot. Instead of skiing every day, we improvised.
We went mountain biking.
We went hiking.
I swam laps at a nearby aquatic center.
One night we went to a junior hockey game. After our friend left town, my wife and I went to a Utah Mammoth game. Great atmosphere, great crowd, and a really fun experience.
We ate good food at local restaurants. We sat in the hot tub. We read books on the porch in the sun.
In other words, we relaxed.
Which, if I’m being honest, is probably what I needed more than skiing anyway.
It also reminded me of something I’ve been trying to do more of lately: actually go out and do things. Not sit at home scrolling through my phone reading about things. Actually go do them.
A hockey game.
A bike ride.
A hike in the mountains.
Coffee on the porch with a book.
None of it dramatic. None of it viral. None of it algorithm-approved.
Just good things happening in real life.
And that’s something I’ve been trying to notice more—finding something good in each day instead of spending the day online reading about everything that’s wrong with the world.
So no, it wasn’t the ski vacation I planned.
But it was a week in the mountains with my favorite person in the world, doing a bunch of good things, and ending most days in a hot tub.
Turns out that was exactly the vacation I needed.