Colorado, Part 5 -- Or, How I ended the trip on a good note

Since you can collect some good stories when you go skiing for the first time, I'm sharing them in installments, some of which are still ridiculously long (sorry). Find out why my instructor called me "The Troublemaker," and then read here about how I earned that nickname by having a screaming Tourette's tantrum on my first green slope. Learn how I finally made it to the bottom on an intermediate slope, only to come back for Day 2 and get yelled at by a crazy dude.

The man started walking toward us. "I want to apologize. I completely overreacted," he said.

We told him not to worry about it. I told him I felt horrible. I could understand why he overreacted; he was trying to look out for his daughter. "I saw her over there, and that's why I was heading to the right rather than going between you two," I said.

The man told us that the day before, his wife had gotten hit when someone skied into her on the slopes. She had to go to the hospital and get a CAT scan. (The man wasn't wearing a helmet. I wondered if his wife had been wearing one when she was hit. K and I both had helmets on.)

"Oh my gosh!" K and I both said. "Is she OK?"

"Well, we don't know."

(OK, this guy's a douchebag again.) He looked at me. "Lessons!"

"I did! I took beginner's lessons yesterday. I tried Schoolmarm afterwards. It was awful. That's why we were up here again today. But I'm pretty sure we're done for the day."

"No," he said. I think he thought it was because of him. Which, honestly, it kind of was. "Don't let that stop you." He was taking a couple steps backward to head toward the gondolas. We wished each other a good trip, and he was off.

And not a moment too soon.

My eyes welled up, and they started overflowing almost before I knew what was happening.

"Are you OK?" K asked me.

"Yeah, I'm fine. I have no idea why I'm crying." It was getting worse, so I put my goggles back on.

I was relieved that the man had apologized, but that act had made it harder to brush off what had happened. Instead of crashing into an asshole, I had collided with a father who had watched his wife get injured the day before. He had probably said everything to me that he had wanted to say to whoever hit his wife. (Never mind, again, the fact that his wife was potentially still in the hospital while he was out here skiing with their daughter.)

After a couple minutes, I felt better, but I was still in shock about the whole thing. I couldn't quit replaying it in my head for a long time.

It had been lightly snowing all morning, and by the time we got to the bottom of the mountain, it had picked up a bit more. K and I walked through the charming streets of the resort to the restaurant where our friends were waiting for us. We actually passed the man and his daughter sitting on a bench on the side of the road, but I pretended not to see them. (Two run-ins was enough.)

We had managed to work up quite an appetite, so once we reached the restaurant, we destroyed chips and queso, and each of us had one of the biggest burritos I've ever seen. (Not to mention one of the most delicious Cokes I've ever had. And a couple ginormous glasses of water.) I actually almost finished my burrito. I'm not kidding, it was massive.

Since it was our last day in Keystone, I left the restaurant to return my rental skis, and the shop guys actually gave me my second rental day free. Score! The snow was still picking up as I walked the short distance back to the restaurant. All our other friends had arrived, and we decided to head out before traffic picked up on the one highway that led back to Denver.

By the time we walked from the restaurant to our rental car, the snowflakes were big and thick. It felt like we were really in a snowglobe. It was the most beautiful snow I'd ever seen!

We hurried to load 10 people's gear between our rental SUV and our friend's pickup. K was warming up the car, and he had turned up some music. Volbeat's "Still Counting" came on. It's a decently new song, and for some reason, it really makes me happy. There's a line in it (evidently it's actually "for betrayal, for betrayal") that I always sing the way I hear it: "a puppy trail, a puppy tray-hay-hayul." There's a funny dance that the beat always makes both K and I want to do, so we were goofing off doing the dance in the snow.

And one of my favorite things to do when it snows is to spin. I don't know why, but I think it's amazing. I go outside, and I stand in an open space, bring my arms up to my shoulders, turn my head to the sky, and spin. Something about the snow makes this an awesome experience.

So there I was, in the middle of the parking lot, laughing at the song, singing about a puppy trail, and spinning in the middle of a real-life snow globe.

Not a bad way to end Day 2.

Definitely not at all.