New Years MN Ski Trip!

Man oh man...what a trip!!! (more pictures will be posted when i get them from Dave)

I must say it was an absolute blast eventhough it was hair pulling frustrations at times.

We started the drive up on Thursday 12/29 around 1 pm as I managed to snake out of work early. It was pointless for me being there, all our other locations were closed anyway. Em and Matt met at my house and we drove my car to Blue Springs where we met up with Dave. The drive up to MN was good, roads were not too bad until we got into the twin cities where it started to snow, just a little, no crazy ass snow like they usually get (thank god). We stayed the 1st night with KK in Shoreview, MN. I ended up staying up pretty late that night just catching up with KK.

Next morning we got up bright and early as Matt the snowboarder wanted to hit the snow "fresh" (whatever that means). We grabbed a quick breakfast at BK and away to Afton Alps we went. We got there at around 10am and by the time we parked, paid ($34 entrance fee & $19 for equipment) and got our equipment, it was around 10:30 when we hit the slopes. It was a completely new experience for me (ski virgin here) and Matt was showing me the ropes. Amazingly, I picked it all up pretty fast and quickly progressed from the bunny hill to the blue hills within a couple of hours. As the day progressed, I got more comfortable and we raced and even tried the black diamonds. It was great and I can't believe I've been missing out on skiing in the last 8 years I've been in this country. I think this is definitely something I want to do again! The downhill skiing was great fun, I can do that all day but tiring and time consuming part was walking between slopes and trying to find one another. We finally called it quits at around 6pm and headed to Steph's place in Hudson, WI. Her parents had a very nice hot tub which we all made good use of. We were too tired to do anything else.

The next day was NYE! We slept in and hung out at Ikea and later that evening had dinner with Steph's friends Chris and Todd. Dave, Matt and me broke off from the group as they wanted to party in the St Paul area. We left after dinner, got KK and off to downtown Minneapolis we went. We ended up in this club called the Gay 90s and celebrated New Years there. It was a pretty cool club, very big with very "interesting" rooms =) The GOOD thing is no smoking in the bars but the BAD thing is they close at 2am. We got a pizza went to KK's and totally crashed.

New Years day was the last day we were to be in MN. We introduced Dave and Matt to the Twin Cities' best chinese duck restaurant (House of Wu) and later shopped at Mall of America eventhough Matt was vehemently against the entire idea. He ended up finding a comfortable spot with an interesting book. We left MN at approx 5pm and made our way back to Columbia. We got back in town at around 2am.

All in all the trip went really well. The two highlights were definitely skiing and NYE's celebration. There were minor spats with everyone having their own agenda but everyone ended up compromising. I will definitely do it all over again!

Happy 2006!