By design, we woke up at 7:00 am instead of sleeping in. The plan for day was to be something along these lines as we crawl out of bed:
– Eat breakfast
– Do yoga, call it a “first” for me
– Pilates maybe for D
– Try to check out the Barn
– Eat lunch
– Go skiing again
The snow did keep falling overnight, and it made for an awesome view to wake up to Monday morning. This picture is poor quality but gives you the idea of the view from the room. You could see pretty far into the distance, and while they were not actually the Catskills in the distance, it gave you the rough idea of them. The landscape was nice with a white blanket.
We arrived for breakfast promptly at 8:00 am as the doors opened, which seemed late to be an opening time for breakfast. There weren’t many people there, so again we got to sit by the window. We ended up seeing many of the same people filtering in for breakfast, including the Range Rover lady. While we eat, we continue to play the game of “what’s their story?” We both find this fascinating to try to figure it out. We also realize our fiction is likely more fun that reality.
This meal is probably better to us than the night before, since we learned our lesson yesterday. We picked the best of what we could see, and didn’t try to eat one of everything. Truth be told, we were both a little content from the night before, so we had no need to gorge any further.
Following breakfast we made our way to the spa, which is where they hold the fitness classes, in this particular case a yoga class. I haven’t done a yoga class in 15 years, at least. As I mentioned to D, I think this qualifies as having reset the yoga clock, so I can say at this point that this is my first yoga class in my current lifetime.
I did enjoy the class, but my right knee was a very sore spot, quite literally. Sitting cross-legged hurts a lot after some time in the same position. Trying to stretch while your knee feels like it’s being stabbed is hard to maintain. The moves are more or less beyond me, from start to finish, which is no surprise. Contrast this to D, who’s been doing yoga for some time now and is quite flexible. I have a long way to go to be half as pliable.
I think the teacher was pretty good though I have no frame of reference. This was hard, but I did feel good after we were done. This is something I should probably do more often. I mean more often than once every 15 years isn’t asking much.
D decided to skip pilates, or whatever the next class was, because doing another activity after yoga doesn’t work especially well. It was just past 10:00 am at this point, and they were still serving continental breakfast in the Lake Lounge, so we went over and got some coffee/snacks while we sat by the fire again until 10:30 and the coffee was taken away.
We took a walk to see the barn, but soon found out it was closed on weekdays. Instead we enjoyed the sunshine and the beautiful day for a few moments before trying to decide what to do.
Our biggest problem at this point is the breakfast train had barely left the station and the lunch train was barreling down on us rapidly. It’s hard to enjoy a meal when you’re barely done enjoying the last meal. I suggested we go snowshoe to burn some time & calories. D thought about it for half a second and agreed. For sure, we needed something to do other than sit around waiting to eat more. This was a good fit.
We went back to the ski shop and picked up some snow shoes to use for the next hour. If you’ve never snowshoed before it’s like walking, but with tennis rackets, on snow. There is no learning curve.
This burned about an hour all-told, which was perfect as it lined up the rest of the day well. The snowshoe link can be found here. About 1.75 miles in 40 minutes. This was on the Eagle Cliff trail which is one of the should-do things in the resort, as evidenced by the views you get in the pics above.
Headed back to the room to pack, dropped the skis on the outside porch, checked our luggage, checked out, then went to the dining hall to get lunch. I can’t say that either of us was hungry yet, but it was time to eat and we weren’t going to skip a free meal of this quality. I mean, free food is free food, after all.
We finished up lunch and sat around, playing a last round of “what’s their story?” in addition to trying to digest & relax a little bit. A bit after 1:30 pm we got up and meandered over to the ski shop to ask for some direction on what we should do. Got a tip on the best loop and headed out the same general direction as the day before.
Conditions were better today for 2 reasons; first due to the snow fall we had gotten the night before, and second due to taking a path less traveled in the woods with less sun & wind exposure. It was better than yesterday and probably a bit more fun, but I will remain firm that I’m happy we decided to make this winter the year of alpine skiing and not Nordic skiing. Still, we enjoyed it, and we got in a good workout that will cover 1/10 of the calories we ate so far today. Maybe.
The last Strava link can be found here. Just about 4.2 miles in 1:22 with 400 feet of elevation. In all a tad more than yesterday in less time with more elevation. Either we got better or conditions were better or both or none of this makes any difference, which is the one I would go with.
And with that, we are done. In the end we did even more than we planned today, though D did skip the other exercise class in lieu of sitting by the fire a bit. But we also added a 2 mile snowshoe loop to the day. In all, we did just over 3 hours of exercise on the day alone, which is pretty good all-told.
Then it was time to get the luggage, the car, and drive home. Nothing of note happened on the drive which is always a good thing. Finally, here’s the magnet from the trip, which is what we collect when we go places. One more magnet for one more completed trip.
Traveling Normandy 