A few days ago, my dad, sister, and I went skiing in Wilmot, Wisconsin. It was a great experience for all of us besides the fact that we had to wear masks all the time due to the pandemic. It is a three and a half-hour drive from our home in Champaign, IL, so we had to get up early on the day we were leaving in order to get to our lesson before it started. At around 7 in the morning, we packed up our things and got into the car. We had to wear three layers the entire time during the car ride as we would have no time to change before getting to the slopes. One downside of the particular ski slope we decided to go to was that there were a lot of people in line to rent skis and buy their tickets, so we had to stand outside in the cold for a while before actually getting on our skis.
As I said, this was my first time ever going on skis down a significant slope, so I was scared at first, but eventually, I realized how fun it was to control my skis and go wherever I wanted on them (in the snow). For our first lesson, we just went on a small slope and learned the more technical things about skiing, like properly falling and how to put our skis on the right way. We also learned about things like the risks of skiing, and how to walk up the side of a slope on skis without sliding down. After trying this on a small hill in front of the slopes, we went up on the lift for the first time. I was extremely nervous about going up for the first time, and it stopped in the middle to make it even worse. But as we went into the second day, I got more used to it and less scared of falling off. The first one we went down was the easiest one, but also the most fun because of all the curves and bumps on it. At first, I didn’t know how to turn or stop at all, but over the two days we were there I caught on pretty quickly. After the lesson was over, we stopped for lunch and then continued skiing by ourselves until it was too dark outside. At night, we got some pizza and a dessert to have in our Airbnb.
The next morning, we had to rush to pack up all of our suitcases and check out of our rental house before the lines got too long at the ski resort. Surprisingly, there weren’t nearly as many people as the day before. we got our boots on and headed to our second lesson. We repeated a lot of the things we did the day before, but we also learned more advanced things like other ways to stop, and how to turn more down the slope in order to reduce the speed. One problem we had was going too fast, and then not turning anymore. This is dangerous because you end up going 30-40 miles per hour at your fastest if you go straight down a big slope. After the lesson ended, we again went down the slopes on our own, but we progressed to going down a blue slope, which is the middle difficulty on ski slopes. these were much more fun, and we were going at higher speeds. We had some hot chocolate, and then we returned our skis and headed to the car for the three-hour car ride back home.
This was a heavily condensed version of our trip to Wilmot Ski Resort in Wisconsin, and we hope to go there soon again. It was a great experience, and I recommend anyone who likes sports and just moving around, in general, to go there for a few days. It gets tiring after doing it a lot for a few days, but if you go for 2-3 days as we did, it’s a lot of fun.
Thanks for reading this blog post, and see you next time.