The perfect plan

Last Monday, Preston and I decided we needed a break from school and decided to take advantage of all the snow Arizona has received. We headed up to St. Johns Monday night, spent the night with Garth's parents and then headed up to Sunrise Tuesday morning.

I don't think I have ever seen as much snow as they had and we were psyched for a great day of skiing and snowboarding. The plan we had was perfect - go up in the middle of the week, avoid all the crowds on the weekend and have great snow, roads and weather before the next storm came through on Wednesday. I was a little worried when we got to the slopes and the temperature was only 11 degrees, but our Arizona sun never lets you down, and it kept us warm all day.
As you can see by all of the snow and the bright blue sky, our plan was perfect and the mountain and snow were absolutely breath taking. The added bonus was the buy one, get one half price on the lift tickets on Tuesdays! Perfect plan!

You can see by the few tracks and lack of people on the slopes that we avoided the crowds. The best laugh of the day was when we were going down the snow park for the first time. I went first and I went off the side of a jump rather than going straight off it. Preston followed me and was headed straight down the jump and at the last minute went off the side like I did. He fell in such an awkward, funny way that everyone on the slope watching started to laugh. There was group of snowboards off to the side and they told him that was the funniest thing they had seen all day. We all had a good laugh including Preston.

To add to our perfect day, we had Indian tacos made with real Indian fried bread for lunch and since they had all their lodges open we didn't have to wait in one line the whole day - not for the chair lift, bathrooms, or food. What could be better?

Our only problem came on our way home. I completely forgot to fill up with gas when we left Show Low - not such a good plan. As we watched the digital gas display count down our miles until empty, Preston informed several times that he was not going to push the car when we ran out of gas. We drove almost 50 miles from the time the display said we had no gas, so we really coasted our way into Globe on fumes. Luckily running out of gas didn't ruin our perfect day in the snow, it just gave us something to concentrate on for an hour or so.