The pain I’m experiencing today is a little different than I was expecting. In the past, I would come home from a snowboard trip with bumps and bruises all over. After this trip, however, my sunburnt face is what’s hurting the most. All it took was one day on the slopes, and the lower portion of my face and nose got fried to a crisp! The second day I wore sunscreen, although it didn’t matter much at that point.

The flight to Utah was the first time I’ve been on Frontier airlines in awhile, and I must say that I am very impressed with their new planes. Each seat has an individual television screen with 24 channels of DirecTV service. Of course this doesn’t come free, the fee is $5 per flight leg. Yesterday on the return flight, I bit the bullet and paid for just over an hour of TV. The time on the plane literally flew by! Hopefully more airlines begin to offer this service (and hopefully for free).

Back to the weekend trip. Thursday night in Salt Lake City was relaxing. We didn’t want to be up too late, since we would be getting up early to go out to Park City the next day. We decided to walk around downtown for a bit and then wandered into Squatter’s Brewery for a couple drinks along with dinner. I would highly recommend both their food and their beer!

Early Friday morning we made the drive to Park City and immediately hit the slopes at The Canyons. The ski shop that I rented my snowboard and boots from recommended this resort, so we decided to do one day here and one day at Park City. The powder left from the recent snow storms was amazing! I don’t think I’ve ever boarded in conditions like these. On one run, the powder was so think we couldn’t make it down without the boards getting buried over and over again. As the day went on, it got warmer and warmer outside. Some of the runs turned to slush, so we decided to spend as much as time as possible at the top of the mountains. The warming also led to the previously mentioned sunburn. I have learned my lesson, and will definitely wear sunscreen at all times, if my skin will be exposed.

Later that night we took rode on the free bus system to historic Main Street. We had dinner at Buona Vita, which was excellent and a good value as well! From there I got us a guest membership at The Spur, so we could have a drink. Utah has some of the strangest liquor laws. Restaurants can serve alcohol but only to customers intending to eat. These private clubs can serve alcohol to anyone, regardless if they are eating or not. I guess you can think of it as paying a cover to get into the bar. Fortunately, The Spur was giving away free memberships!

Saturday we headed to the slopes at the Park City Mountain Resort. The early conditions on the mountain were fairly similar to the previous day, although some of the lower lying area had turned to ice from the previous day’s slush. Again we tried to stay as high on the mountains as we could. I think that overall I liked Park City better than The Canyons, mainly because Park City had more intermediate runs. These are still the runs that I enjoy the most.

After spending the entire day on the slopes, we again went to Main Street for dinner. This time I wanted to go someplace with TVs so we could watch the end of the frozen four. We decided on the Hungry Moose Pub. We had some good beers on tap from Wasatch and good bar type food. After the game, we headed back to the hotel. By this time both of our sunburns had gotten the best of us.

Early on Sunday we drove back to Salt Lake City and had a little tour of the city. We first drove by the Capitol building and stopped in at the nearby visitor center. From there we drove past Temple Square, which is the main temple for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. If we had more time, we could have taken a tour and then maybe I would have more to add about the center of downtown. After just a few minutes there, we drove out to the Olympic Cauldron Park, where the cauldron and stadium still stand from the 2002 Winter Olympics. We were then out of time so we returned to the airport and flew back to Kansas City. Not only was this a great trip, I have now visited 33 states!

Park City on Dwellable