This is a tad too long, but I really did want to encapsulate the whole 'skiing experience' in this piece - you have my permission to stop reading at any point!

I’ve never been too keen on the idea of skiing.  In fact I always thought Jasper Carrott summed it up when he’d said skiing was something like “hurtling down a mountain at 100 miles an hour with a pair of Esther Rantzen’s toothpicks on your feet…” So when it was announced that a family holiday had been booked to Colorado, in honour of my parents-in-law’s 40th wedding anniversary I wasn’t exactly jumping for joy.  Still, I couldn’t refuse to go, not when my husband, my husband’s parents, my husband’s sister and her two children were all going along, now could I?  (Luckily I get on really well with my in-laws, or this really could have shaped up to be the holiday from hell before we’d even got started).

As my husband Jon was the only experienced skier; the rest of us were booked into ‘ski school’ for the first three days of the five day holiday.  Naturally, the kids couldn’t wait and marked each day off on the calendar as we got closer…I envied their enthusiasm as I read up on proper exercise techniques needed to prepare myself for a skiing holiday (before promptly abandoning them for wine and TV).

In the meantime, we had to get kitted out for the holiday, and for this purpose Jon and I spent one whole perfectly good Saturday morning meandering round the local ski shop for just the right attire to make us look like the Michelin Man on the pull.  I was amazed at just how much was needed…thermal long johns and tops, salapets, polo-neck tops, neck warmers, gloves, goggles, a ski-hat and a ski jacket…yes folks, you may not be able to ski, but at least you’ll always look sexy on the slopes in this little lot.  There is a downside however, as you do have to pay through the nose to look this good.  I picked up a white ski jacket that didn’t look too bad…then clocked the price tag. £950. I cleared my throat, gave a defeated shrug and sloped off to the ‘Sale Now On’… end of the shop.

Anyway, the dreaded day finally came and I think I coped with the journey fairly well…all 14 hours of it, consisting of 2 hours in a coach to Heathrow, 8 hours on a flight to Chicago, another 1.5 hours on a flight from Chicago to Denver, and finally 2 hours on a coach to the interestingly named Beaver Creek Resort, Colorado.

And I have to say that it was just beautiful…breathtaking mountain scenery; authentic log buildings and fir trees lit up like, well, Christmas trees, with rows of twinkling lights.  Almost worth the journey, if it wasn’t for the fact that we were going to be spending the majority of the time skiing…

After a good night’s sleep and a hearty breakfast, the first thing we had to do was to hire our ski equipment.  Off we trudged, all seven of us, to the ski hire shop next to our hotel, where we were fitted with weighted boots with clamps disguised as buckles on the sides that made it almost impossible to lift your feet – and you certainly couldn’t bend them.  I looked round the shop and pretty much everyone wearing the ski boots was doing an exaggerated ‘Frankenstein’s Monster meets John Travolta in Grease’ type walk.  Then it was on to getting the skis themselves.  We could choose from three categories, ‘beginner’, ‘fast’ and ‘extreme speed’…no prizes for guessing which one I chose.  The nice man at the counter demanded I tell him my weight so he could fit the skis properly…he had a hearing problem so I ended up having to shout it so loud that it echoed round the entire shop.  Not the most embarrassing moment this holiday would have in store for me, but mortifying nonetheless.

After the skis had been selected we were then asked to collect a pair of ski poles.  I put my skis down, selected the poles…then found that I didn’t have any spare hands to pick the skis back up again.  “How the bloody hell am I supposed to carry all this?”  I thundered to Jon, who showed me a technique whereby you balance the skis on your shoulder whilst holding the ski poles in your hand.  Sounds easy enough, but given that you’re dressed in all your Michelin Man gear and you’re wearing weighted boots in which you can’t bend your feet, this is no picnic.  Jon, bless him, got more than a little frustrated with the rest of his beloved family as we struggled in our weighted boots and nearly took people’s eyes out as we tried to get used to balancing the skis on our shoulders.  I certainly didn’t feel capable of hurtling down the mountain at full pelt, but it was straight off to ski school we went.

Ski school was a short trudge away from the ski hire shop – small mercy when a blizzard had just started up, and us four adults stood like abominable snowmen outside, next to the sign stating ‘Ski School Level 1 – Wait Here’.  (the two children got to wait in the warmth of the special kids’ skiing school). 

Finally Neil, our instructor, arrived.  He looked like an older, weather-beaten version of Barbie’s companion Ken, and spoke with a thick Australian accent – as did most of the instructors I could hear around us.  He explained that as we weren’t experienced skiers, we would take a shuttle bus over to the ‘nursery slopes’.  We all trudged, Frankenstein/Travolta-style, off to the bus, and soon we were on the slopes, with beautiful mountain scenery all around us.

The actual skiing started out harmlessly enough.  We were told to clip one ski to the left boot, then take that one off and try the right, skiing in a single line.   Some of the other students, including my parents and sister-in-law, were toppling over onto the snow at this point, and the fact that I managed to remain upright at this early point in the lesson lulled me into a false sense of security “Piece of cake…” I thought, marvelling at how easy it was.  Then, we actually had to climb a slope and ski down it, this time with both skis on.  A tad more difficult; the slope was only small, being as we were only on the nursery slopes, but it felt as though we were at the peak of Everest.  Still, we all managed to ski down the slope competently enough, coming to a natural stop at the end.  Then Neil demonstrated a stopping technique he called the ‘wedge’, whereby you kick your heels out (so your skis form a wedge shape) as you ski, and it acts as a kind of brake.  Looked easy enough, I thought – and sure enough everyone else in the group seemed to pick it up with no problems. 

Then it came to my turn.  I skied confidently down the slope and kicked out my heels.  The thing is (and I personally blame Neil for not making this clear from the beginning), if you don’t kick both heels out at exactly the same time, one acts as a kind of steer, helping you to turn instead of stop…and I did exactly this, unintentionally taking a sharp turn to the left and unable to stop myself from hurtling straight into a pile of stacked-up skis left by the other group while they’d gone for lunch.  “Oi! – we’ve paid good money for those!” the other Aussie ski instructor shouted good-naturedly at me as I tried to pick myself up on the slippery snow, still wearing my skis, to the amplified sound of hysterical laughter from my group and two others.  I grinned and did a little curtsy for my audience as I finally managed to right myself, while inside I was stinging with embarrassment.  But on the bright side, this was a great time to discover that falling on the snow didn’t hurt too much.

A good thing as there were many more falls to come…a notable one consisted of my unintentionally sliding backwards on the slope and careering into three other people in the group in a kind of domino effect, sending them all flying into the snow.  Even more embarrassing when I realised that two of the people I’d just knocked sideways were my sixty year old parents-in-law (who were picking everything up just brilliantly).

Negotiating the ski lift was the next challenge, as we all finally mastered the ‘wedge’ and Neil decided we were ready to move on to steeper slopes.  Getting onto the lift was easy-ish enough (you ski up to the lift and just sit down on the next seat as it rotates round).  Unfortunately, getting off it is an entirely different matter.  There was a ramp at the end of the lift path and Neil had told us to stand up, place our skis on the ramp, get into an upright position and, placing one hand on the seat, push ourselves down the ramp to join the rest of the group for the next part of the lesson.  Well, I managed to place my skis on the ramp, get myself into a standing position…then promptly lost my balance, hitting the snow with a thud and banging my head on the seat as I went down.  To add complete insult to injury, my ski poles had gone flying as I’d fallen – and a little girl of no more than seven years old picked them up and skied confidently over to me, with a polite, “Excuse me, Ma’am, but you dropped these…” as I lay sprawling on the ground.  “Thanks…” I responded through gritted teeth as Neil rushed over to help me up double-quick so they could get the ski lift going again.

The kids – surprisingly, some as young as three – were certainly far more advanced than the adults, going further up the mountain than the adult groups and learning to ski without poles.  On one occasion Neil was assisting me with a particularly difficult slope, holding my arms as I skied down it like a fawn learning to walk, when all of a sudden my eight-year-old niece blurred past me, with a cheery “Hello, Auntie Nina!”

“I can’t do this!” I cried to Neil as he picked me up from yet another fall.  “Well, you’re going to have to – the only way back down now is to ski down…” was his matter-of-fact reply.

And in the end, ski down I did.   Eventually I managed to get the hang of the wedge and the turns (and even the ski lifts!) and Jon has a video of me skiing proudly down the mountain and back to our hotel at the end of Day Three of ski school.  A proud and happy moment indeed…but not half as happy as I felt after taking off the skis and the weighted boots and going to the hotel bar for a hot wine.

“Now you can ski, we can go on proper skiing holidays together!” Jon enthused at the bar.  I smiled politely and drained my glass.