Christmas in Kansas

Justin and I flew to Kansas for our Christmas break. Christmas is way more fun with family, without them it is just another day. Oh how glorious the colder weather and snow was! And reasonably priced delicious food! We are looking forward to moving back to the USA in a few months. We better get some visitors this time. In case you are unaware, our next duty station is Ft. Meade, Maryland.

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So not all my outings are winners…Snow Day in Roccaraso

Yesterday Justin and I went on a “snow day”.  It was a lunch and bus ride (through a company from base) up to Roccaraso, Italy, a ski resort town.  We would be able to ski, snowboard, or sled as we pleased for about 5-6 hours and they’d take us back…a 12 hour day of fun and travel.

So we wake up and get to our meeting point outside of base and the bus is 20 minutes late…no big deal. We get on and start the 3 hour journey. After about an hour I check my camera to make sure it was charged, it was…but I didn’t bring a memory stick, so no pictures. About another hour later my nose starts to bleed out of no where and I have no tissues. Luckily it wasn’t a long bleed, probably just an altitude/dry weather thing. I was able to stop it by breathing and tilting my head for about 5 minutes.

Finally we made it to the ski slope. It is raining and super windy. Our leader asks the lift operators if the lift was going to stay open, he said probably not for long. Then the tour leaders decided we should all meet at 2pm to go ice skating in the town instead of stay on the mountain. That gave us two hours to do snow stuff and eat lunch.  So Justin and I decided not to rent boards or get lift passes.  We ate and then played on a giant mound of snow and slid down it…like  a steep mini mountain. We also dug some fantastic holes. The snow was perfect, easy to make snowmen or snowballs and in many areas when you stepped you’d sink 3 feet…much fun, even though it was short lived.

Justin was not dressed appropriately at all, two layers of pants and tennis shoes. He realized on the bus he should have worn his work boots, duh. So after a little bit of playing in the snow he was too wet and cold to want to continue. We need to get him some snow pants.

We had to meet up with our bus and others in the group to go to the skating rink…and btw the lift did not close so we could have snowboarded or gotten sleds if the tour leader would not have changed the itinerary. I think he was catering to the handful of kids that came…story of our lives on base in Naples…if you don’t have kids the majority of activities and programs will not be for you.

Once we got there we had only an hour to skate before we had to leave, so we didn’t go in, because we wanted to play in the snow and did not want to go skating…that’s not why we signed up for that tour.

So we finally make it on the road back to Naples, we were wet and cold and just wanted to get back. The heat on the bus was not working. Then our bus broke down, twice. We had to wait for another bus to come get us and take us back the last hour and a half back to base. So that added an extra hour on top of our 3 hour bus ride home.

Overall, the trip was a bust outside of about one hour where we played in the snow.  Sorry I could not capture the failure that was the trip with pictures =). Happy MLK day.