Unexcused Absences

When we first started this website to document our complete abdication of responsibility, we figured it would be read by our family and a few close friends. We are delighted to discover that we are more widely read than we thought! In fact, we’ve been fortunate enough to make new friends who’ve stumbled across our little corner of the internet.

We love hearing that the Unexcused Absences site is being forwarded to folks planning a vacation or to somebody who wants to do a bit of armchair adventuring. And best of all, we love hearing from readers when they comment on our posts! We really enjoy interacting with a community of folks whose thinking and outlook are similar to ours.

So, thank you for reading, thank you for commenting, thank you for sharing with us! Unexcused Absences is nothing without our readers!

Next week we’re off to France to continue our canal cruise on Après Ski, so hopefully the posts will become more interesting very soon. As we mentioned earlier, the boat has been moved to south-west Bourgogne (Burgundy), land of farms, forests, and wine! We will be reporting from the beautiful Canal du Nivernais, a very old waterway originally used to haul firewood and limestone to Paris. As of 2011, the locks are still fully manual – in fact they are some of the few remaining manual locks in Europe – so hopefully we’ll have enough strength remaining in our arms and hands to write about the experience!

Finally, we have something new — an updated and modernized web site! Heather’s been working on the web site all summer (when she hasn’t been sewing curtains for the boat). In addition to freshening up the look and improving the comments section, the web site’s also had a number of technical changes behind the scenes that mean the site should work better on more devices (smart phones and iPads), and has a great framework for some fun additions in the future. If you normally read our posts in email or in Facebook, try clicking on over to unexcusedabsences.com to view the complete package!

When we are in France, it’s like we never left the USA in many ways. The countryside has fields, farmhouses, and beautiful scenery. The cities have buses, shops, and gum on the sidewalk. We live in a nice little (floating) apartment that has a great view and can move around to fun places. France is definitely a first world country. In other ways, though, there are distinct elements of both culture- and lifestyle-shock.

Store and museum hours are a big one. All but the biggest typically open for a few hours in the morning, close for a two hour lunch, re-open around two or three in the afternoon, and close again for good between five and seven in the evening. Almost all are completely closed on Sunday, and most also close a second day, usually Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday. It may not seem like a big deal, but we are awfully spoiled in the US with our long hours and no closings for lunch. We were so used to simply going to the store for whatever we need, at whatever hour, on whatever day, that it still hasn’t sunk in, even after all our time in France, that we really have to plan our grocery and provisioning supply stops well in advance. It is remarkably easy to get caught in a small town, on the wrong day, and end up with no fresh fruit or bread (neither of these keep well, our fridge is tiny and the bread has no preservatives). On the plus side, the quality of the bread/pastries and fruit/vegetables are lightyears beyond what we can get in the States, so the trade-offs (and putting up with limited business hours) might just be worth it!

Speaking of store hours, they treat closing time differently here. In America, as long as you get through the front door at, say, 6:59pm for a 7pm closing (not that an American store would close at 7pm, but bear with me…), you’re allowed a reasonable amount of time to gather up your goods, check out, and be on your way. Not so in France. Heather was once in line at the checkout, in the process of having her things rung up, when 7pm struck. She was allowed to finish her transaction, but the two people in line behind her were made to leave their carts and vacate the store, kind of like the “checkout Nazi” – “No groceries for you today, get out!” To my engineering mind, the clerks would spend more time restocking the shelves with all the items in the two carts than they would just checking out the last two people, but what do I know? It’s not my country.

"Cuisine US", American kitchen!

We get a kick out of how foreign language is used for marketing purposes here. It’s really just like back in the States, but here the exotic foreign language is English! In the US, kitchen items like towels or aprons are emblazoned with French phrases; here, we have a rug that has little kitchen icons along with words like “toaster,” “pudding,” “dishes,” and “egg.” A little dose of home! We’ve also seen real estate ads here for nice homes that advertise “Cuisine US,” which means it has an American-style kitchen. The irony is that a big selling point for fancy homes in the US is “European Kitchen!” Another fun one is the T-shirts emblazoned with nonsense English phrases like “Forest Mountain Climbing Club” and “Chicago Team.” Same but different.

Instructions for, um, "walking" your dog

Another thing, nobody loves their dogs like the French. Most western cultures love their dogs (some eastern cultures love them for different reasons), but in France there are dogs everywhere. People take their dogs into the grocery store, an no one bats an eye. Dogs are everywhere, in the restaurant, in the post office, maybe even in the theater, although we’ve never checked that out first-hand.

Check etiquette in restaurants is completely different. In the US, we expect the waiter to bring the check immediately following desert, where in France it’s considered the height of rudeness to bring the check before we specifically ask for it. I’m sure that little difference has led to some international incidents over the years, in both cultures. I’m convinced that right now some American couple in France is quietly stewing for 3 hours waiting to leave the restaurant, while simultaneously a French couple in the US is wondering why American waiters are so rude. The subtlety is that when an American waiter brings a check, the implied understanding is that you can linger as long as you want. Whereas in France, once the check is presented, you’re expected to pay-and-vacate promptly. Same but different.

In the same vein as the dinner check, the French consider it a violation bordering on a jailable offense not to have close to correct change when approaching a cashier. While it’s considered ok to hand over a 10 euro note to pay a bill of, say, 8.24 euros, the cashier will give you the stink-eye if you hand them a 50 euro note to pay for the same 8.24 euros. Never mind that the difficulty in making 1.76 euros in change (if you hand them 10) or making 41.76 euros (if you hand them 50) is no different (only two 20 euro bills), they look at you like you just killed their dog. To me, the hard part is creating the 1.76 (a handful of 1.00-, .50-, .20-, .05- and .01-centime coins); the two 20-euro bills are trivial in terms of time-motion-efficiency. But here, you instantly become persona-non-grata. No attempts on my part at merci (thank you), or bonne journee (have a nice day), will crack the glare of ill-will from the cashier. It’s a tremendous amount of overhead for me to remember to have a complete selection of bills and coins with me so I can present the cashier with close to the correct amount. They’re totally happy to make change, as long as you don’t hand them more than 20 percent over the stated bill.

But while cashiers hate pulling the extra two twenties out of their till, they think nothing of stopping to help you dig exact change out of a pile of coins. Several times we’ve seen cashiers cheerfully spend what seemed like minutes digging through an old lady’s purse to extract the correct change, and no one in line seemed to mind at all. It’s all part of the “exact change” culture!

The Smart car

Almost everything here is small. Tiny cars, tiny vans, little tiny streets, corner grocery stores, many things seem to be about 20-30 percent smaller. Fortunately, not quite everything is smaller; wine bottles are still 750 ml! And to be fair, some things are as big as in the states. Buses and long-distance trucks, to cite two examples, are just as big as ours. The French have even begun to embrace the “big box” concept, where they’ll have what we’d call an industrial park on the outskirts of medium to big cities with lots of large home improvement stores, groceries-plus-everything-else stores (like our big Target or WalMart stores), furnishings and appliance stores, etc. Pretty soon we’ll have them eating processed pseudo-meat patties with sauces of dubious origin between two buns… oh wait, the French have McDonalds too. But it really is the “Royale with cheese” instead of the “Quarter pounder,” just like in Pulp Fiction (we checked).

Tight fit for the delivery van

A _very_ small car

As a general rule, expect things to be smaller. If you rent a condo or apartment anywhere in Europe, for example, prepare to rub shoulders with the people you’re staying with. One time we stayed in the French Alps with our friend, the Minister of Leisure, and a few others (5 people total) in an apartment billed as “sleeps 9!”, and we could only sit 4 at the dinner table at one time. Plus, in our bedroom, the bed arrangement was two singles, one that slid out from under the second. But to make room to slide out and extend the second single, we had to put the end table in the closet AND close the bedroom door. I guess in a fire we were supposed to first fold up the second bed, then open the door and escape. The five of us were packed in tight, and we’re still unclear as to where the other four were supposed to fit (remember, it “sleeps 9”). Oh, and the washing machine was the size of a toaster oven; I think if you had to do laundry for 9 you’d have to give up a day of skiing to process the 27 loads you’d need to do.

Horse meat!

The French enjoy red meat as much as, even more than, most cultures. The difference is that they cut up their cow in a completely different way. The names may be the same (eg., filet mignon), but the way the meat is cut is quite different. And they use the whole cow. You don’t even have to search beyond the corner grocer to find offerings like kidney and liver, much less tripe (stomach lining), tongue, brain, or other parts that end up discretely disappearing into sausage or hot dogs in the US. Oh, and there’s a very popular red meat here that Americans would never consider; horse meat! Same but different.

Something funny happened when we decided to camp out out west of Carcassonne. We had just gotten Après Ski settled in for the evening, and walked 40 meters up to a small bridge to check out the paysage (countryside), when a co-ed group of muddy (it had been raining the past three days and the towpath there was dirt, turned to mud) French cyclists rode up and stopped next to us. They had obviously been cycling for a good long while, as they looked severely bedraggled. But they were all about our age and in very good shape. “Dans quelle mesure à Carcassonne“ (how far to Carcassonne)? They asked. “Je pense dix kilomètres“ (I think ten kilometers) I replied.

Out came a series of “Zut alors” (aw, shucks), and other less family-friendly phrases I was not taught in high school French class. “Nous avons besoin d’une pause” (we need a break). “Avez-vous un allume-feu” (do you have a light)? as they all produced cigarettes. “Nous sommes très sportif” (we are very athletic). Apparently they carried cigarettes for their exercise breaks but not lighters. Either that, or they carried matches which got soaked in the rain. The details are unclear. The funny thing, of course, is that in both cultures people of all ages enjoy a day of bike riding, but at this point American athletes would have broken out a healthy mix of organic grains and nuts, or maybe in extreme circumstances a PowerBar or some beef jerky (but only made from cows that lived relaxed, pastoral lives, and listened to nothing but NPR), whereas the French athletes fired up… cigarettes.

Complètement le même, mais tout à fait différent (completely the same but totally different).

This post could also be called “The 2010-2011 Ski Season By The Numbers.” I figure it will be enlightening to break down the last five months quantitatively. In no particular order…

Snowfall

By all local accounts, this was a fantastic year for snow. We have no frame of reference, since it’s our first full season at a big western resort, but even in mid April the slope coverage is quite good. And we picked up almost no rock gouges in our skis, normally a big problem out west.

Grand total snowfall at Beaver Creek, 385 inches (a normal winter is about 310)

Grand total snowfall at Vail, 482 inches (normally 345)

[Update] The final week of the season, Vail hit 500 inches for the year (see the Vail Daily article summarizing the season’s weather).

A ski for (almost) every occasion

Skis

We began this season with 5 pairs of skis in the car on our drive to Colorado; pair of Rossignol race stock 155cm Slalom skis and a pair of 170cm Fischer RX-8 skis for Heather, and a pair of 174cm Rossignol 9X’s, a pair of 178cm Fischer race stock GS skis (for competition) and an older pair of 181cm Fischer GS race skis (cruising) for me.

I’m slightly embarrassed to note that on our drive back to the east coast we will be carrying 11 pairs of skis (well, 10.5 to be precise, but that’s another story *). In addition to the 5 pair detailed above (minus one of my Rossignol 9X’s), we’re bringing a pair of 170cm Fischer Cold Heat all-mountain skis and a pair of 170cm Volkl Kendo powder skis for Heather, plus a pair of 175cm Fischer RC4 Progressor all-mountain skis, a pair of 184cm Volkl Kendo powder skis, and a pair of 191cm race stock Atomic GS skis (courtesy of Scott Snow – thank you!), for me and a pair of 168cm Volkl Tigersharks for dad.

Grand total skis acquired, 6 pair

Tips Collected

I collected $770 in tips, and Heather, who taught twice as many lessons, collected $1,380. For perspective, during Heather’s multi-year ski instructing career at Bryce Resort in Virginia, she received a total of $20 in tips. Sometimes it’s fun to hang out with rich people.

Grand total tips, $2,150

Ski Gear Purchased

In addition to about $200 each spent on ski clothing (pants, base layers, etc.), we bought the following big-ticket items:

• Fischer Cold Heat 170cm skis & bindings – $150
• Fischer RC4 175cm skis & bindings – $345
• Volkl Kendo 170cm skis & bindings – $385
• Volkl Kendo 184cm skis only – $100
• Tecnica Inferno ski boots (for Heather) – $620 (including custom footbed and custom fitting)
• Hotronics electronic ski boot heaters (a set for each of us) – $180

Grand total gear purchased, $2,180 (hey, we almost earned in tips what we spent on gear!). Sadly, I was unable to acquire what I really wanted, a pair of 165cm Blizzard race stock slalom skis.  Next year.

Days and Vertical Skied

Vail Resorts’ Epic Mix system keeps track of pass-holders’ days on mountain and total vertical skied for Vail, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, and Heavenly. My official count was 75 days and 1,257,725 vertical feet at Vail and Beaver Creek. Heather had 84 days and 950,960 vertical feet on these two mountains. In addition to the official Epic Mix totals we had 3 days at Aspen, 3 days of cross-country skiing at Tennessee Pass, and I had 5 days at Bryce.

Grand total skiing, 86 days and ~1.3 million vertical feet for me, 90 days and ~1 million vertical feet for Heather.

Loot from the Beaver Creek and Instructor Race Series

The local racing series were pretty lucrative for me. In the instructor series (Tuesday afternoons), I won the following items; two pairs of Schneider racing gloves, street value ~$100 each, plus an entire sack full of Bud Lite / Nordica ski straps and Bud Lite / Nordica beer coozies, along with the odd Bud Lite lime-green baseball hat (given away at the insistence of my favorite wife).

In the Beaver Creek Championship Series (Monday mornings), I won a pair of goggles (~$130), a Nordica / Bud Lite ski bag (~$70), a set of top and bottom Mountain Hard Wear base layers (~$90), a Budweiser T-shirt (limited value), another set of bottom Mountain Hard Wear longjohns (which I traded with a fellow racer for a dinner-for-two coupon at Main St. Grill, $30), a stainless steel 40-oz drink canteen (~$20), a Subaru T-shirt (also of limited value), and several more lime green Bud-Lite baseball hats (also given away in the pursuit of marital harmony).

The next-to-last day of the season was the second annual Vintage Race Day. It was quite a show. They had set up an old-style race course, complete with vintage start banner, bamboo gates, and old race bibs. Someone was there renting out ancient ski gear. You could only enter the races if you had gear from before 1995, when shaped skis made their appearance. Heather and I rented old skis and boots for $50, and Heather won a $50 gift certificate to one of the nice on-slope restaurants, which we then traded with a fellow raffle winner for a Hotronics boot/glove warmer/dryer (worth about $50).

The racing was one of the better deals this winter, because my total entry fees were $25 for the Instructor Race Series ($5 each for the five races), and my entry to the Beaver Creek Championship Series was comped because I worked in the race department. In addition, the B.C.C.S included free appetizers and all the Bud Lite you could drink (hey, it was free…) at the after-parties Monday evenings. And to top it off, our team (Coyote Cafe) in the B.C.C.S. won third place for the season, so we received priceless B.C. Championship Series third-place beer mugs. Readers of our previous posts will remember that third place was a tie, and we (generously) offered our mugs to the other third-place team, and then the organizers felt bad and had another set of third-place mugs made up for us. Nice!

Grand total race loot, $590 (not counting all the Bud Lite / Nordica ski straps, beer coozies, or green baseball hats)

The 3pm cookie frenzy

Afternoon Cookies

Skiing at Beaver Creek has a perq that’s unique in the entire ski industry, I believe. At 3pm every day, a parade of “chefs” in white chef outfits appear at the base with hot, freshly baked chocolate chip cookies. Many days this can turn into a cookie frenzy, giving added gravity to The Beav’s motto, “not exactly roughing it.” Some days we’re still in uniform when the cookies appear, and it’s verboten for employees to get cookies while in uniform.  Still, we had our fair share over the season.

Grand total free cookies, not as many as you might think!

Fancy Restaurant Meals

This count was at zero right up until our final weekend. We had resisted the siren song of all the delicious restaurants at Beaver Creek, in the name of maintaining true to our household austerity plan. A few days ago, though, I saw in the Vail Daily that Ristorante D’Oro was offering $30 fixed price dinners, including soup, salad, main course, and desert, plus $25 bottles of wine. This is a restaurant where the entrees alone are around $30, and the wine list normally starts at $60 and goes to infinity. We rang up Greg and Susan and had a great evening, the one-and-only time we succumbed to the decadence of fine dining this winter.

Grand total fancy restaurant meals, 1

Miscellaneous

A  hand-written note mailed to Heather from one of her 5-year-old students, thanking her for all the fun and hoping to see her again – Priceless!

* The missing ski story. Right now I only have one Rossignol 174cm 9X ski. As you might remember from before, we have some decent extreme terrain here at The Beav. One day a few months ago I was skiing the Stone Creek Chutes in about a foot of fresh powder, and chose Chute 44 to host a yard sale. I flumphed into a pile of heavy powder snow about a third of the way down the chute, my feet and skis stopped dead in their tracks, and in slow motion my center of mass moved out over my feet and down the hill. Over I went, and in an instant I was sliding down the chute face first, quite a bit faster than I was comfortable with. I glanced off an aspen tree (fortunately not a direct hit) and continued my slide all the way to the bottom, discarding skis and poles along the way.

Powder day in Stone Creek

I could see one ski and one pole sticking out of the snow about 75 yards above me, but there was no sign of the other ski or pole. 45 minutes of searching in the deep powder revealed nothing, so I proceeded to ski out of the area on my one remaining ski (skiing moguls is tougher than you’d think on one ski). I returned the next couple days to continue the search, but to no avail. The ski patrol tells me it will be June before the snowpack in this section melts. I left them my phone number and email and the promise of a couple cases of Fat Tire beer if they find my other ski. Hopefully I can report good news on this front in a few months!

Beaver Creek is famous for its snow grooming. In fact, The Beav regularly trades number one rankings in skier surveys with Deer Valley, Utah, for their grooming proficiency. They buy $300k Pisten-Bully snow grooming machines like they’re going out of style.

I thought it would be fun to capture the nightly grooming activities in a time lapse video, so click below to see the machines in action in a 30-second clip. The video does have music, so if the boss is within earshot, drop your volume or mute your PC.

Here is a direct link in case something doesn’t render properly with the embeded video player: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WfYbnkqMZKI

Kent’s mother passed away on Sunday.  We miss her terribly, and celebrate her memory.

Ruth & Kent

Ruth Christian passed away December 19, 2010 following a massive cerebral hemorrhage. Her passing was painless; she simply never awoke from her afternoon nap. She bravely fought the encroachment of Alzheimer’s for years. She leaves behind an enormous hole, impossible to fill, in my life and the lives of her son (my husband) Kent and her husband of 50 years, Don.

I first met my future mother-in-law skiing. Kind and welcoming, she and her husband Don, immediately took me in. From the moment I ‘stole’ her son away until the last time I saw her, she made me understand I was part of her family. I am so thankful for the years of fun, laughter and skiing we had together. She is an inspiration both for hard work (she certainly worked hard), and for enjoying life (when she wasn’t working).

Ruth & Don's Wedding

Ruth had great adventures over the years, too many to recount here, traveling before it was trendy or easy. She originally envisioned DC as an overnight stop en route on a driving adventure along on the newly completed Pan American Highway. The folks who emptied her car that night and stole everything she owned will never know how grateful we all are that Ruth was forced to stay here and work, ultimately meeting her future husband Don at the corner of 20th and Sunderland Place (Dupont Circle)! That’s right, Kent owes his existence to inner-city car thieves.

Ruth lived every day at full throttle, waking early and heading to bed late. I remember she carried a paperback book in her purse, telling me she intended to finish it when she had break. She carried that book in her purse for 30 years … and never finished it. There was always work to do, friends to see, parties to throw, and fun to be had. I don’t think Ruth was ever bored in her entire life.

I also know of and experienced her legendary generosity, which occasionally bordered on what can only be called stupidity now that she isn’t here to hear me say it. Never a big one for causes, Ruth’s attention, courage, and considerable energy were focused on people, not organizations. During the race riots in DC following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., she loaded up her car with Kent’s baby things, drove along streets with burning buildings and riots, found a young mother and her son who needed a hand, and gave them Kent’s outgrown clothing and toys. When she saw a problem she could fix, she simply took care of it.

Kent & Ruth Ski Racing Feb 1980

Ruth loved the outdoors and considered hiking with Don to be the best form of vacation. To keep up with Kent, she began ski-racing in her 50’s, competed nationally, and continued to ski into her 80’s. Ruth gave me my first pair of skis, took me through my first race, constantly encouraged me in my favorite sport, and beat me on the race course into her mid 70’s.

Ruth had some great sayings over the years. Here are some of my favorites:
-When trying to get Kent and me to go do something fun when we had chores, “I used to worry that I had to have the house clean before Don and I went somewhere to have fun, and I wasted a lot of time.”
-On eating ice cream, “Oh, I’m just trying to fill in my wrinkles.”
-And a favorite of all of us over the years, “Why don’t you join us for dinner? I was about to …” a)”put on a ham”, b)”grill a steak” or c)”put this in the oven.”

Kent & Heather's Wedding

Ruth will be deeply missed by those she left behind. We can celebrate her memory by opening up our homes and kitchens to friends, old and new, or by setting out on an adventure with a willingness to work hard and with an open heart.

We will hold a wake here in the DC area in January. Her ashes will be returned to her beloved Canada later this year.