Lost credit cards, sick kids, smashed fingers and other mishaps when we tried to relive a favorite family trip
Sometimes — okay, very often — as vacation-committed parents, we grow weary of inflicting theme-park death marches upon ourselves and our little ones. Sure, kids love nothing more than trekking across alcohol-barren concrete landscapes of LEGO blocks and Disney amusements. But an endless kiosk-gauntlet of plastic toys can be daunting and costly. For the price of two chirping, flashing light sabers, my wife and I calculated, we could buy a tank of gas to ferry us to a ski resort in Utah come winter.
So we did exactly that, booking a weekend at beautiful Eagle Point in Beaver, Utah, between Christmas and New Year’s. Watching my sons (ages 5 and 7) and their mother skiing pristine, uncrowded slopes was incredible. (At 40, I seem to have lost the will to continuously slam my body into snowpacks. I took trail-vantaged photos of my family with a Nikon and drank beer in the lodge.) The boys picked up skiing so effortlessly and had so much non-whiny fun that my wife and I, during the drive back to Las Vegas, discussed the idea of returning the very next weekend.
Thus, I misguidedly presented an idea that, on its surface, seemed harmless enough: Why don’t we invite our neighbors Matt and Alyssa and their two boys to Eagle Point?
And so I ignored, at our own peril, a fundamental tenet of what I like to call Reality-based Parenting 101. Actually, two tenets. The first goes like this: One kid is fine, two kids are tough, and three or more comprise an act of self-destruction. Second rule? It’s always a bad idea to try to relive a perfect moment with more participants.
What was it French existential philosopher Sartre famously announced again? Hell is other people’s puking, tyke-sized skiers? Yes, I’m sure that’s what he said.
Our neighbors accepted my poorly considered invitation for the first week in January. We rode to Beaver in separate SUVs, spending the night at the Best Western Butch Cassidy Inn at the base of the mountain. In the morning, we drove up, arriving at the services lodge just before it opened so that we could rent ski equipment.
Things began to go wrong very quickly. En route, Matt and Alyssa’s 7-year-old son Ennis had thrown up his complimentary breakfast inside their vehicle. Now the poor thing was, uh, decorating the parking lot and his shoes.
“Car sickness,” his mother shrugged. “Happens to him all the time.”
I nodded and offered to help Matt sponge the floor mats. Irritated by the task, he shooed me away, so I got in line for the rental shop, slipping into my role as porter. Little did I know just how extensive and thoroughly exhausting my role would be on that nerve-shredding day.
In minutes, I signed waivers and secured gear and helmets for my family. I watched them launch down a pretty, powdery slope, my wife screaming at our daredevil sons: “Pizza!” (If you don’t know, it refers to forming a triangular wedge with your ski tips pointed together, a braking and turning technique for novices.) I snapped a terrific photo of them tearing off. Laughing, I trudged back to the lodge. It would be the only flattering picture of our visit, and my last moment of levity.
Ennis was fully suited and booted, but his complexion was green. He looked drained, his eyes barely open. He stood at wilted attention, dazed.
“He can’t still have motion sickness, can he?” I said to his mother. She didn’t hear, as she was engaged in a losing debate with her husband and older son and the rental cashier regarding snowboards. I didn’t think it wise to rent a board without taking at least one lesson, either. But I had no opportunity to interject my lack of expertise. That’s because Ennis suddenly threw up waffle batter and syrup on his ski pants and rental boots.
Eyes wide with horror, his parents stared at him, then looked at each other.
“I bet it’s food poisoning,” she said.
Matt shook his head in repulsed surrender and turned his attention to the matter of snowboards. Meanwhile, the super-friendly lodge staff hurried to fetch kitty litter.
Trying to make the best of a bile situation, I took Ennis by the clammy hand and into the men’s room, where I used the sink and paper towels to spot-wash him. He seemed better, his complexion slightly improved, so we exited the restroom.
But then Ennis bumped into another kid from behind, upchucking on his ski jacket. The kid didn’t notice and, with a bit of Ennis’ breakfast resting in his hood, boot-clomped in pursuit of his father. Ennis and I said nothing. I still feel kind of bad about that.
Returning to the rental shop, I noticed that Ennis’ initial pile had been littered and scooped from the lodge carpet. Matt, Alyssa and the older boy were outfitted. Which meant my fate was sealed: I would be relegated to Sherpa and care for Ennis.
“He’ll probably feel better soon,” said Alyssa, stooping and struggling to fasten the last aluminum buckle on her boot. “Matt and Chris really want to ski now.”
“No problem,” I said, as her pouting husband pushed off with his ski poles toward the slope instead of helping her. “We’ll be in the café. Go have fun. Wait, let me help.”
In the process of snapping the boot clip into place, I somehow pinched my fingers fiercely enough so that I was cut, my index finger welling. I sucked the blood.
“Thanks,” she said, oblivious. She hurried to catch up.
I helped Ennis upstairs, where he laid down on a wooden picnic bench. I ordered a coffee and was about to take a sip when my wife texted me. She had lost her credit card somewhere in the parking lot. She had removed it from the wallet in her purse and slipped it in her jacket pocket. Only it wasn’t there now.
Please look for it?
“Be right back,” I said to green-fleshed Ennis, who nod-groaned with his eyes shut.
I rapidly scoured the ground by our cars. Nothing. I checked the lodge’s lost and found. Nothing. When I went back to the café, Ennis was ready to hurl again. I retrieved a plastic sack from the garbage.
It’s a multitasking moment that will forever mark a low point in my adult life: using a threadbare T-Mobile connection to chat with a Bank of America representative in India while simultaneously encouraging a sick, lime-hued child to heave into a Lays potato-chip bag instead of into his rented helmet. I did this while hands-free slurping from a Styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee, after having clumsily wrapped my mangled, still-oozing finger with cheap restaurant napkins.
And then, after canceling our missing Visa, I really jinxed myself, because it occurred to me: Well, at least our vacation weekend can’t get any worse.
That’s when I gazed out the lodge window and onto the slopes below to see my 7-year-old blowing right past the ski lift at the end of the green-circle (beginner-level) trail. He was now plummeting along a blue-square (intermediate) trail and darting for a tunnel at what looked like top speed. He disappeared into the maw, on his way to, I was completely convinced, a deadly double-black diamond (advanced) trail rife with tall, bone-crushing alpine trees.
To my wife’s credit, she didn’t collapse from panic. Instead, she and our fearless pizza-wedging 5-year-old headed in pursuit of the older child. I said a silent prayer to John Cusack, who played a high school ski-team captain in the ’80s teen-comedy film Better Off Dead.
Better my wife than me.
It was the lady selling hot dogs in the café who suggested the obvious. “You know we’re at an elevation of 11,000 feet, right?” she said, indicating suffering Ennis. “He’s got a serious case of altitude sickness. You should take him to the tent.”
“The tent?” I said.
“First-aid station. They’ll hook him up to some oxygen and he’ll be good as new.”
“Great!”
We were descending the staircase when the boy’s mother showed up, to my relief, but sans husband. She led Ennis to see the onsite medical team, who snapped a mask on Ennis’ face. I had just finished my cold coffee and exchanged texts with my wife confirming that everyone was alive and back on the green-circle trails. I was about to order a hot dog when Alyssa said, “He’s not responding to the oxygen. The EMTs told me we have to get Ennis off this mountain right now. Before he dehydrates!”
“OK,” I said. “What do you need from me?”
She needed my wife’s car, which we’d bought two weeks ago. The kid’s dad was out on the slopes, his cell phone turned off, and he had the only keys to their SUV. So I had to either lend Alyssa our shiny, new-car-smelling Hyundai Santa Fe, or I had to drive them down the mountain myself. I opted for the latter, hoping she would sit in the back seat with him and catch any of his overflow.
“I can’t sit next to him,” she warned, “or I’ll puke, too.”
Great. Which means — you guessed it — the kid eventually projectiled all over the back seat (and against the back of the bucket seats) in our brand-new Hyundai, which I’d driven off the lot 10 days prior.
So much for that new car smell, replaced by an odor that is, for the most part, gone now thanks to copious amounts of baking soda and abundant air fresheners, save for a lingering ghost trace now and then.
At least I found my wife’s canceled Visa card in the drink holder.
I drove my neighbor and her son off the mountain. As soon as we pulled into a diner, Ennis was restored. His color was back. He stopped puking. He smiled and ordered a big slice of apple pie with ice cream. Who knew a marathon-hurling session could leave someone famished? I would have eaten something, too, but somehow the effort of borrowing a hose and some rags from the eatery to wipe out the insides of our new car killed my appetite.
It was my bad. I had enjoyed a wonderful moment with my family and sought to expand the pleasure I derived by expanding the participants. It had seemed like a wonderful notion, but the numbers — the odds — were stacked in my disfavor. Little kids are, I have since confirmed, little more than glorified puke spouts that offer fleeting moments of cuteness. I had tempted fate by returning to gorgeous, picture-perfect Eagle Point with another family in tow, and fate responded. How? By uncorking one of the four children we’d brought with us to this powdery paradise.
I bear Ennis no ill will. He’s a great kid, even if he pretty much ruined my wife’s wheels and strained our marriage. We remain close friends with our neighbors Matt and Alyssa. In some respects, we’re a lot closer now that we have endured such an ordeal together. And despite our last experience at Eagle Point, my family is planning to go back this season — just the four of us, of course. More importantly, I’ve learned that it can be better to savor a moment in memory rather than risk tarnishing that memory with a second, riskier, more complicated go-around.
At this point, the only destination we can ever bring both families to is a soul-gouging theme park in California. We’re already saving up for those light sabers.