Rainbow Ball

Let’s see, what happened on vacation in Park City, Utah today.   Some of the group went skiing in the morning while some of us (the children and me, for example) stayed back and visited the pool, outdoor hot tub and fitness room.    I did not visit the fitness room on account of I’d already exercised the day before and I didn’t want to mess up the weight gain from all the food I’ve been eating.   Also, it’s vacation and I’m lazy.

After lunch we got in our ski gear and snow shoes and went to inner tube.   Not inner tubing on water though, this was down a snowy mountainside.   The whole setup was fairly self-explanatory.   Get an inner tube of your preferred size and color.   Grab onto the pull strap and drag it behind you as you follow the people before you towards the “magic carpet”.  

The magic carpet is a rubbery version of the horizontal people movers you find in airports.   It’s about  eighteen inches wide and goes up the incline of the mountain.   You step on the magic carpet with your inner tube in tow and at the top, step off and walk over to the line of people waiting to go down one of the channels of snow.  

That was fun, we all agreed, but it wasn’t as much fun as going up to the higher level would be.   We all got back in line, did the magic carpet thing and then got in a second line.   At the head of the line you sit down in your inner tube and the handle is hooked into a conveyor and you’re dragged uphill.    That part was pretty fun in and of itself as well as offering up a good chance to take pictures.   Here’s what that part looked like:

Then we all got to go down this:

We went down solo, in pairs, in groups and once at the end all ten of us in one massive pile of inner tubes.    No one had a bad time.   Everyone had fun.  

As we piled back into the fifteen person passenger van to head to dinner we looked over above the mountain as the sun was sinking.   There was what I can only describe as a “rainbow ball”.   It wasn’t a rainbow in that it had no start or end and it didn’t have an arch formation.   It was simply a bright spot of sunlight through the clouds that had the full range of rainbow colors displayed.    It lasted for a few minutes and then faded as the sun got closer to setting.

The Big Boy Update:  When we got to dinner tonight I asked my son if he could read the children’s menu himself.   He read through it with some help from Juliette beside him and then asked me if he could order his own meal.    I told him he definitely could.   When the waitress came over to take orders she went around the table and my son, who typically doesn’t pay attention to the ordering process, said, “mom, I didn’t get to place my order”.   I told him he she would be getting to him next. I think he was pretty proud he placed his own order.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter is having trouble telling blue and green apart.   With her Crazy 8’s deck she thinks one is the other so I just told her to swap the colors in her mind.    This afternoon we were at a snow park with movable blocks.   My daughter was having fun moving them around and jumping on them.   Remembering from before about the colors she told me, “I’m going to jump to that blue or green block”.   I told her it was green and the other was blue.   Once she knew, she kept them straight for the rest of the time.