My First Ski Trip was at an Olympic Venue!

“When you take risks you learn that there will be times when you succeed and there will be times when you fail, and both are equally important.” - Ellen DeGeneres

 

It’s crazy to say that I went skiing on the slopes next to the ones that will be used for the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. But, like my grandmother said when I told her I was on a ski trip, “You’ve never been skiing a day in your life!” I was gone learn that day!

So, here’s the story… my friend, Dom, and I decided that we wanted to do a ski trip as my going away celebration. We’re both from different areas of the U.S. where skiing is not available. Heck, there would barely be enough snow to build a snowman. As I mentioned before, the 2018 Winter Olympics will be held in Pyeongchang, South Korea. We thought it would be a smart idea to spend time in the area before everyone else makes there way up. We stayed at the Yongpyong Resort, which I highly recommend, and had several activities and opportunities to do things. Mind you, we’re travelers on a budget. About two weeks from our trip, we spent hours trying to figure out transportation options to and from the destination that would be cost efficient and excursions that would be cheap, so we could enjoy our time not worrying about money. [If ever traveling to Pyeongchang Olympic venue, the closest bus station is Hoenggye (횡계).] Neither one of us had ever gone skiing before, so we thought about taking lessons. We looked online and saw that English lessons were about $300.🙅‍♀️  That’s a negative. We saw an option for group lessons, 1:7, for about $70. We decided to go with that. We get there early Saturday afternoon, to plan out our time and search the area. We found so many Olympic souvenir shops, that we had to window shop to make sure were saving our coins for the other purchases we needed to make the next day. We had been planning to go bowling for the longest, so we decided to do some late-night bowling games and called it a night.
 

Sunday, the day we were going to learn how to ski… EPIK FAIL! We wake up around 10, because the afternoon sessions start at 12:30, to get prepared and get some type of food in our system. Come to find out, breakfast ended at 10:30,😑 so we had to order lunch. We were content with our meals and ready for our skiing adventures. We get there a little before 12:30 and was told to wait a bit. We saw others waiting as well, so we were so excited to join a group. 12:30. We get to the counter and was told that we were on a waiting list and to come back in about 45 minutes; we come back, as was told only three people signed up so they had to cancel. 😣I looked in the corner of the sheet and saw that she wrote “English lesson” in Korean. AHHHHHH!! I don’t understand why it’s not understood that we were not about to spend extra money for broken English. Since we missed about 1.5 hours for the afternoon ski session, we decided to go to the night session. Let me tell you, YOUTUBE works miracles. 🙌

We get back to the room and watch YouTube videos on “learning how to ski.” We watch about a good 45 minutes worth of lessons, so we felt a little confident. Since we had to wait til 18:00, we decided to go into the city and check out the nearby venues, souvenir shops, and search for the Olympic mascots in the area. We found this frozen lake and was brave enough to walk on part of it.😅 Because we saved an extra $70, we went Olympic souvenir shopping. We may have gone a little overboard on the shopping. 🙄But, who cares. I think we will have some of the good stuff before everyone else comes over and snatches it up. Walking around the city (Hoenggye is very small), we started to discover the Olympic mascots around by accident; it turned into a game of iSpy, to see how many we could find before the end of our trip. We found a lot!

 

Fast-forward past dinner…18:30. We got our hot packs, gloves, thermal leggings and shirt, googles, boots, rented our ski gear and pants. WE READY!! (This is the part of the story Dom and my grandmother found hilarious.) I got all my gear on, quicker than Dom, and were on the ski lift. WE MADE IT TO THE TOP! I’m trying to angle myself on the slope, because we learned from YouTube to stay in “the pizza stance.” I was in a narrow pizza stance and next thing you know, I go flying down the slopes not able to stop myself. My life flashed quickly before my eyes. I literally threw myself backwards to fall so that I didn’t crash. Literally everyone was watching, even instructors… 😒. NO ONE tried to help me. Dom came scooting along laughing, trying to help me up. I lost my ski pole and one of my ski. I was sliding like crazy trying to connect my ski to my boot; it slid down the hill. GAHHHHH!! I took off my other ski to make it easier to get the other one. Dom got my pole for me and I was set to try this thing out again. FAIL! AGAIN! I went flying down the slope and somehow my ski detached from my boot. Fast-forward to after my small tutorial from Dom. I KNOW HOW TO SKI and control my speed and direction. The other 3 tries were 100% successful. I do say I was proud of myself. I think the next time I go skiing I may do some lessons.

 

Next time, I’ll be closing out chapter 1!