Afton Alps

Last night I went skiing at Afton Alps. It was an interesting experience, different from other ski places I had been to, and a great deal of fun.

I drove less than an hour east of the Twin Cities to Afton Alps, which is right on the Minnesota-Wisconsin border. The first thing that was "different" was that instead of parking and buying a lift ticket at a ticket window, I bought it at a kiosk as I drove in -- like I was entering a park. I drove around until I found a rental shop -- as it turned out I drove right by the nearest rental shop, a mistake that I would come to regret.

I went into the "Meadows" rental shop and marveled at the fact that I was the only one in there. I leisurely picked out a spot to fill out my rental form. When I was done, I looked up and noticed that about 50 middle schools students (completely unsupervised) had entered the shop, pushing, yelling and giggling like middle school students do. I quickly moved towards the front of the line with my completed rental form, but about ten kids (savvier than I) were already there, filling out their forms while waiting in line. (To be sure, it made no sense for me to do the same when I thought myself the only one in the shop. Eventually I made it to the front and went over the counter to get my boots.

I told the guy I wore size 11, and he handed me some boots which I tried on. Well, I tried to try on. My feet wouldn't even fit in the boot. Maybe he was so overwhelmed he automatically grabbed boys' 11 shoes; I don't know. So it was back into the boot line to get boots from a woman who apparently was more careful selecting boots. Then I picked out my skis -- 170s again. Upon reflection, I think I may have gotten type II skis. Oh, well. Then ended up working. I then picked up my poles and waited in line to check out. And waited and waited.

The middle school students were taking a lot of time getting out of there. I was reminded of what the world looked like through middle school eyes. "Snowboarding is better than skiing. Skiing sucks. I've never been downhill skiing a day in my life." Fortunately, that was met by a perceptive, "Then how do you know you wouldn't like skiing?" which stunned the other party into silence and, one can hope, a bit of reflection.

When I was 3 or 4 munchkins from the front, a rental shop employee took pity on me and pulled me out of the teeming masses of prepubescence to check me out. Escape! It was 5:00, and I was hitting the ski slopes.

If you look at Afton Alps' trail map, you'll see it's fairly large -- at least compared to the other places I'd been. That meant that I had to figure out how to get from where I was to other parts of the hill. I started out in the lower left in the Meadows area and skied "Susie's Meadow", "Daisy's Meadow" and "Maggie's Meadow". My confusion was amplified by the fact that "Mary's Meadow" has been replaced by a half-pipe -- a fact not reflected on the ski maps. After a few of these runs, I was ready to head somewhere else -- but how?

I overheard a father asking his kids if they wanted to ski on another part of the mountain. I listened closely to hear how they were planning to ski there. Nope -- Dad was bringing the car around. Well, that wouldn't do. I tried again; this time I skied on the other side of the half-pipe and picked up "Mickey's Meadow" -- a blue slope. Gasp. Well, I made it down by skiing fairly slowly. The worst part of it was the ice patches that had developed in the middle.

I was away from the area I started in, and a few more trips down I tried skiing over to the next lift. That brought me "Polly's Powder" and "Ruthie's Meadow" -- more green (beginner) slopes, if the names didn't give that away. Eventually I made it to "Paula's Pass" (or was that "Patti's Pass") -- a blue, which I took down to the other base lodge. I was running into trouble because I didn't have much cash in my pockets and the food courts didn't take charge cards. I'd have to head back to the Meadows to my locker -- but not before skiing down "Christina's Trail" and "Nancy's Nursery" (again, more greens). The big lift to "Lisa's Lane" went over an interesting variety of terrain. Apparently during the summer they have golf there; it was somewhat disconcerting to see a ball washer sticking out of the snow.

After a little refreshment, I headed back out and tried out most of the same slopes again. Still, I hadn't made it to the "Highlands" area, and I wanted to try more blue (intermediate) slopes before I was done. I cut across to "Renee's Ridge" and then was on "Dawn's Highlands". Uh-oh. It was late (almost 9), I was getting tired, the slopes were icing up, it was dark and this was a steeper pitch than I was used to. So I skied very slowly down to a lift at the bottom. Thankfully I made it without getting clocked by one of the skiers and boarders whizzing down "Bernadine's Highlands".

Then the question was...what would I do when I got to the top? The trail map was confusing. (At one point, I was looking at it, and a member of the ski patrol came over to give me directions. "What are you looking for?" "What's that slope there?" "Hmm; I don't know. Let me see your map.") I decided I would definitely head back to the Meadows by going left. I did so and got to the top of what I later figured out was "Britta's Run". The slope was fairly dark, the chair lift there wasn't running, and there wasn't another person around. But heck, there was no "trail closed" sign, so it was down the hill. I eventually found my way back to the top of "Renee's Ridge" and by keeping left of that made it back to the Meadows. Whew.

It was definitely exciting. I skied almost all of the green trails there and worked a handful of blues into my day. I worked on controlling my speed and started getting better at completing my turns. I definitely improved at being able to come to a stop on an incline. The size and variety of terrain whet my appetite. I'd like to go to one of the bigger ski areas. But it's getting late in the season, and my travel plans lean towards South Carolina, so we'll see...

Some of these are disturbing...

I'm #5 on Yahoo! for "Egyptian Rat Screw".

...and #6 on Google for "rat screw".

I'm #3 on Google for "dali autumnal cannibalism".

I'm #34 on Yahoo! for "dungeon women".

I'm #7 on Yahoo! for "convention freaks".

I'm #10 on Yahoo! for "sling bikinis".

I'm #34 on Yahoo! for "NUDISM MISS".

Disturbing Search Requests

This article at the Village Voice points to a site called Disturbing Search Requests.

So I'm not the only one who gets people looking for Katie Couric Soles (though what's disturbing about this is the same search turns up someone with a Katie Couric obsession and a foot fetish) or Cthulu pictures (which helpfully makes me realize I've misspelled Cthulhu).

Buck Hill

I went skiing at Buck Hill last night with my co-worker F. (Digression. I decided to start using initials -- following West Coast Girl -- to represent recurring co-workers. F was represented in earlier entries as the vegetarian who ended up renting the Rover Seventy-Five in England.)

It's getting a bit warm for decent conditions to ski in Maryland in March, so using this trip to Minnesota for some late-season skiing seemed like a good idea. Buck Hill was maybe a 15 minute drive around for us, which also made things easier than making a 2-hour trip to go skiing back home. The facilities were definitely on a smaller scale -- you bought your lift ticket and paid for your rental in the ski shop. Unfortunately, there was no good place to change outside of the men's room -- meaning there was no good place to change.

F. had never really been skiing before, so the first thing we did was head over to the beginner hill. (If you look at the trail map, that's "New Beginner Area".) We used the rope tow -- a new experience for me -- to go partway up the hill so he could practice. He was about as awkward as I remember being my first time out, and he had a harder time standing up. After skiing down the NBA a few times, I left him to practice before his lesson and went to the "Gawn Double Chair".

Buck Hill is in the middle of the suburbs (apparently the suburbs grew up around it), which led to a few interesting things. For one, I could use my cell phone on the lifts -- which I did just for the dorky "guess where I'm calling from" thing. That was a little bit tricky, as the chair lifts didn't have restraining bars. But, I survived. Also, on my way up one time I heard sirens in the distance. When I got to the top, there was a trail of smoke blowing above the ski area, and I could see a house on fire. Too bad for the people involved, but it was otherwise kind of neat.

I then skiied down J.T.'s Half-Pipe (not sure if I was supposed to do that), Jabar, and Teacher's Pet. After getting practice there, and seeing that F was into his lesson, I decided it was time to hit the blue slopes. I headed to the Quad Chair, and rode to the top. This seemed to commit me, as the trail map they posted at the bottom seemed to imply that I couldn't get down via a green slope.

Unfortunately, once I had gotten to the top, there were no clear signs. The clearest sign was the one that said "Easiest Way Down", so I followed that rather than risking ending up on the black diamonds (although the starting gate they had on Milk Run tipped me off). This led me down Meadows, on the other side of the hill. That was slightly annoying, as the Miner Double Chair on that side of the mountain wasn't running. The next time down, I was sure to finish with sufficient momentum to carry me most of the way to the Quad Chair.

After a few runs down Meadows, I went back to check on F's lesson. He was really lucky -- he was the only one who had signed up for the lesson, so he got an individual lesson at the group lesson price. Speaking of prices, this place was pretty inexpensive. It was only $35 for a lift ticket and a rental, and my dinner (which I had about then) consisted of a brat, chips and a bottled water for $5. They were going down Teacher's Pet and the NBA, so I skiied in that area for a while. When they were done, I went over to see how F was doing. He was having a lot of fun, but was still a little intimidated by the chair lift and Teacher's Pet. So he said he'd ski in the NBA for a while. So I decided to head over to Pet's Peeve, a blue trail.

It didn't end up being that bad at all. I skiied across rather than down it, and never quite lost my balance. On the other hand, I now see why people complain about the 300' vertical drop at Buck Hill. On the greens, I didn't really mind, since that leads to slower skiing. Also, many of the greens I'm used to don't go to the top of the slope anyway. But going down Pet's Peeve was very, very quick. I decided to end on that note, and we went back to the hotel.

All in all, I enjoyed Buck Hill. It was slightly less "modern" than the Pennsylvania resorts I've been to, but not in any way I can really complain about. It wasn't crowded at all, and the slopes, while shorter, were pretty nice. The price was cheap, the people were stereotypially Midwestern friendly, and the price and location were right. The magazine First Tracks Online has an interesting article about Buck Hill.

Jensen's Supper Club

Greetings from Minnesota. I had (thankfully) an uneventful trip. A highlight was getting to use my Avis Preferred membership. No going through the rental counter; just walked out to the parking garage, saw my name on an electronic bulletin board, went to the space number indicated, and drove to the exit where I showed ID to the guard. I was on my way.

I checked into my usual hotel, relaxed for a little bit and headed out to dinner. Our "team dinner" was at Jensen's Supper Club. The last time I went there, I came away disappointed. Maybe my expectations were too high; maybe I just shouldn't have ordered the fish. This time, my expectations were pretty low, and I ordered the prime rib. (The fish was the "house speciality", but the prime rib is the "house favorite" -- or was it the other way around?) It was very enjoyable, and dessert was Booker's Bourbon. I've started ordering small batch bourbon as dessert; it's been fairly enjoyable. So far I've had Knob Creek, Sam Houston and now Booker's. I'm not sure which is my favorite -- they've all been fairly good.

Anyway, this morning, I wasn't overly thrilled with my decision last night to have the bourbon, but I've recovered fine while sitting through the morning meetings.

See Jon Ski

I've posted pictures from ski trips past here.

Time Shock

Well, I tried to wander around before the lectures yesterday, but the falling snow put the kibosh on that idea. If I'm similarly stymied this morning, at least I have the bus tour this afternoon.

I did wander out later during the morning coffee break -- partially to look around and partially to get away from all the smoke. The smoke in my room has lessened somewhat, which means that much of it was probably due to the previous inhabitant. But the section of the hotel with the conference contains a lot of people, and thus a lot of smokers. It always shocks me to see someone lighting up at a random place indoors. I want to say, "Hey you can't do that," but of course they can; it's only my American sensibility (and that's even a sensibility limited to parts of the country).

Speaking of the part of the hotel with the conference, an adjacent room featured a metal detector and a bunch of cops hanging around outside. The next time I walked past it, I put my glasses on and saw a sign with the Korean flag, another flag and the words "Welcome Reception." Then it was off to the Flags of the World web site to identify the other flag as the Mongolian flag. I did a news search, and sure enough, President Bagabandi of Mongolia was due to visit Cheju. Cool.

Last Friday, George warned me about the effect of the time difference. He said he had stayed up on the entire flight to Kuala Lumpur last year, and then he had gone to sleep right afer arriving -- the standard suggestion for dealing with jetlag. He said everything was fine until about 8 PM the next day, when he was overcome with sleep, only to wake right up at all hours of the night.

I, by contrast, napped some on the flight over. But I sayed up most of Korean "Monday" and went to bed around 10 PM. I woke up at about 6:30 and felt pretty good. I went down and had an overpriced breakfast at the "Cozy Cafe", checked my e-mail and went to the morning talks. I was feeling pretty good; maybe I was better able to handle this time difference than George. Wrong. After lunch, I was dead. During an endless series of 25 minute talks, my modus operandi was: listen to the first 5 minutes of the talk, decide the speaker didn't have anything interesting to say that couldn't be gleaned from the proceedings, nap for 20 minutes, wake up, clap, repeat. I went to my room and took a nap before the reception, wandered around there for a while, checked my e-mail (yeah, I'm obsessive) and went back to sleep.

I did, however, beat George in the sleeping through the night department. There are some areas you just shouldn't try to compete with me -- probable primality testing and sleeping are the two that come to mind. I made it through the next day (Wednesday) pretty well, though I decided to get to bed by about 9...for some reason sleeping 9-6, which corresponds to sleeping 7 AM to 4 PM Eastern Time, seemed like a good compromise. Well, at least it gets me up and using the computers before everyone else.

Smells Like Greensboro

I'm trying not to be jaded. Really. I recognize how lucky I amm to be able to jet around the world. In the past twelve months, I've been to Belgium, England, California (3 times), Minnesota (twice), Arizona (twice), Michigan (twice) and Illinois. But here I am in Korea and the biggest culture shock I'm having is from how much everyone smokes. My hotel room reeks just as much as ones I've had in Greensboro, North Carolina and in Winnipeg.

Landing in Seoul went smoothly. Immigration and customs, I'm sure, will be more of a hassle in the US on the way back. I looked around for a while and found the shuttle bus to the domestic terminal. It's funny how my experience traveling was more important than the language/culture barrier when figuring out where to go.

Everything went so smoothly, in fact, that I managed to get on an earlier flight to Cheju. For whatever reason, I was in economy class on this leg. No matter; it was only an hour to Cheju, an island off the southern coast of Korea. Once there, I pretty easily found the No. 600 bus to Chungun, the resort area where my hotel is located. Looking out the window, I could see the streets of Cheju City...lots of neon, Korean characters everywhere, but other than that not clearly so much different than English cities. After a bumpy hour crossing the island, I arrived at the Cheju Shilla hotel.

It had taken me until I got to Korea to find my hotel in my guidebook, so I had had some trepidation about the quality. I needn't have worried. When I finally did find it, it was labeled "super-deluxe". Pictures of world leaders who stayed here -- Clinton, Gorbachev (in his pre-Pizza Hut, Soviet leader days) -- adorned the walls. Actually, you could say that it was more of a culture shock staying in a fancy-schmancy hotel than the fact I was in Korea.

After checking into my room, I headed for a conference tutorial session that was already in progress (it hadn't been on the initial program, so I hadn't planned to arrive in time for it). After a few minutes on braid groups, I was feeling pretty groggy, as well as concerned that my house might be in ashes half a world away. So I ducked out and headed for the hotel's Internet center. The price was 5000 won for 30 minutes of service. That seemed like a fair price to check on the continued existence of my home, but there didn't seem to be anyone to pay. Oh, well, an ever fairer price! The alarm appeared to be eminently false, so I dashed off a few quick, "look, I'm in Korea" e-mails and headed off to bed.

It's somewhat easy to forget where I am when I'm in the hotel, especially during the talks. Fortunately, one look out the window reminds me. To the north is the snow-capped peak of an extinct volcano. To the south is the sea with a fleet of what appear to be fishing boats anchored just off shore. I'm up pretty early -- it's already Wednesday here -- and the sun is about to rise, so I'm going to try to get in a couple of hours of wandering around by the beach before the first talk.

Classes of Service

Because of the length of the flight to Korea, my employer sprung for a business class ticket for me. This expenditure seemed fairly extravagant.

This judgement did not pervent me from resolving to enjoy the hell out of the experience. With almost 48 hours in transit and less than 90 on the ground in Cheju (yeah, I'm a nut), flying was going to be a significant portion of this trip.

Perhaps due to the lack of business class on the Dulles to San Francisco leg, I ended up in first class. Woo hoo. Of course, I had gotten about 3 hours of sleep the night before, so I was not awake to enjoy most of the flight. Still, I slept in a really comfy chair instead of the cramped chair I would otherwise be subject to. And the meal service was comparable to being in a restaurant instead of...I don't know; the guest of a bad cook who doesn't like you. As I was warned by a colleage who has more experience with United, they offered teh meal service in order of number of frequent flier miles, which meant when they got to me, I was pretty hungry, and they were out of the fruit.

I arrived in San Francisco and hustled to Gate 102 for my flight to Seoul. I turned on my cell phone only to receive a message from the alarm company saying that a fire alarm had gone off at my house. Oh, crap. I called them back, and all they could tell me was that they had called the fire department and hadn't heard back. Nice. I asked them to check into things and call me back. I made a few frantic calls to get someone out to the house to look into things. ADT then called back to let me know that the fire department hadn't seen any signs of a fire, and had thus not broken into the house. I felt a little better, but ultimately I had to get on the plane without knowing the fate of my worldly goods.

The San Francisco to Seoul segment had me in business class. I'm not quite sure if international business class is inferior to domestic first class. The flight attendants may be a tad less obsequious. The chair, on the other hand, is quite amazing. (Go ahead, click on that link to see it.) It comes with 7 pages of instructions. The most notable feature is the leg rest, which comes out of the chair in La-Z-Boy-like fashion. There's also an individual video screen, which I had permanently tuned to the map channel. As I was writing a draft of this entry, we crossed the International Date Line and entered Russian airspace. (Is this such a great idea?)

I was somewhat bothered to be in the front row -- it's the dreaded lack of a seat in front of you for storage purposes -- until I discovered the seat next to me was empty. Wow. A place to pile all my junk!

So after a bit of napping, I resolved to stay wawake and try to adjust myself to Korean time. Let's see, if it's 10:45 AM there, that means it's...8:45 PM yesterday back home. Weird.