Sledding, Again

This past Saturday we went sledding.  Sledding is an activity that, unlike hiking, the children never get tired of.  Never mind that sledding involves walking up a hill just like hiking does, hiking up the sledding hill has a purpose, and it's not to get to some arbitrary place that Mom picked out on Google Earth, it's to slide down again!  So that you can go and hike up that same hill again.

Our sledding excursion this time, however, was to somewhere new.

We tried and failed last year to get to Tajikistan's one and only ski resort.  When friends came to visit last fall we took a drive (when there was no snow to make the roads dangerous) up to the ski resort.  When we got there, there was a lot of construction and the last seven kilometers of the road had been graded.

So it was no surprise when an email went around about the newly opened Safed Dara ski resort.  When the idea was passed around about going up for sledding, I asked Brandon, he shrugged his shoulders, and we committed.

After driving an hour and a half on unpaved roads that were always bumpy and occasionally rutted ice, Brandon was rethinking his decision to go and 'have some fun' at the ski resort.  He was muttering darkly about not being friends by the time we made it through the line for tickets, found the sledding hill, figured out that we couldn't use our own sleds, rented their tubes, and then hauled our sleds back to the car.

But, by the end of the day, he admitted that we could probably go back again.  There's nothing like sledding down a fast hill in the sunshine in a beautiful mountain valley while your children whoop in delight to improve your mood.