An Albion Ski Adventure of Incredible Fun

My letters to my parents and my phone calls to them from the one phone booth in the first floor of Seton Hall were filled with details of how hard I had to work on my academic studies.  Usually happy conversations followed, and occasionally my mom would say “Don’t forget to have fun!”  The following adventure was expected to be a routine chance to go skiing with a group of my friends and to ‘obey’ my mom.  I must say that when I look back at this weekend, I see that I had more fun than I would ever have again, even including when I skied the fabulous Mammoth ski slopes in California.

A group of five of us would join a group of ten in Cadillac, MI, but our group had generously offered to pick up RonB who had gone to Ann Arbor to pick up his skis and boots.  As we approached the outskirts of Ann Arbor, someone suggested we stop at a phone booth and call Ron and tell him how sorry we were that we had forgotten to pick him up and unfortunately we were already reaching the Cadillac area.  We all heartily agreed to this plan, and we arrived at his home about 10 minutes after the call.  His mom answered the doorbell, and we saw her face fall, then heard her say that Ron was so disappointed that he promptly left to go to a movie. 

Our search for Ron began immediately.  Two groups of us argued our way into a couple movie houses, walking to the front and turning around and looking at the audience all the way to the back.  No luck.  We then went to a house with an apartment that belonged to a former Albion grad and a friend of Ron.  Once inside, the entire downstairs was pitch black, and, unable to see that the stairwell turned, we had to boost one of us up over the banister.  No luck finding Ron, so we wrote a message on a mirror with a can of shaving cream when a deep voiced command asked us what we were up to.  We had to explain everything to the home owner.

We gave up our search, and drove on toward Cadillac.  At 3 AM we passed a gas station then decided we needed to turn around and get some gas.  As we swung right to get a good turning radius, our rear wheel sank into a snow-covered ditch.  All of us began to pull snow out from the car bottom.  One person went for help at the gas station and soon his pickup and a chain pulled us out.  By 3:30 AM we reached our motel room, which was a modified chicken coop.  We easily snuck into the room where everyone else was sprawled all over the place.  At 6 AM we headed for a restaurant.  Before I could finish my pancakes, one table yelled out “To the slopes”, copied by another table and another.  A couple hours later Ron would join us from Ann Arbor.

The skiing was great sport.  Some of us were experts, I was a relative novice, but GlenK was new to the sport.  He was grabbed by an expert and before he knew what hit him, he was being taken up a rope tow and dumped out onto the slope without instructions!  At the end of the day, he was sort of able to ski straight down a tall slope.  But he was quite tired and at the bottom he began doing unplanned cartwheels, which ripped his ski pants from stem to stern.  This was most entertaining to other skiers because he had sewed a large red heart onto the seat of his long johns!