Growing up I was raised a skier, but always wanted to snowboard like both my parents. They put me in ski school at the age of about six because it is easier to learn for kids. For a while we were not able to go on any ski trips because my sister and I were avid gymnasts. That sounds like a weird reason, but we would have to travel for meets practically every other weekend, and we could also not risk getting hurt doing other activities. In the fall of my eighth  grade year we had planned a ski trip to go to Big Sky, Montana during spring break, but this time my dad promised to teach me how to snowboard. My dad travels a lot for work and has managed to get some cool snowboarding trips out of it, so he is pretty good at it. His boss lets him borrow his house, which is why we were going to Big Sky. The plan was to fly out from our hometown of Roanoke, Virginia and go to Seattle, Washington for a day or two. From Seattle we would fly into Bozeman, Montana, and drive to the house from there.

Unfortunately, things did not go quite as planned. In December I hyper-extended my knee during my final tumbling pass of a gymnastics meet. My knee felt ok to walk on, but it was not getting any better. It took about a month or two of MRIs and x-rays for the doctors to finally decide that I had a severe bone bruise with a few microfractures, which explains why I was able to walk fine. This means that when my knee bent backwards, the bones hit each other hard enough against each other to cause a couple of cracks. They said that the only way for it to get better was to use crutches for basically a month, which was really frustrating since I could walk. The time that I was supposed to be on crutches overlapped with this trip, so my mom did whatever she could to make sure that I still enjoyed the trip.

I crutched around Seattle, which wasn’t my favorite experience, but the city was pretty and different than any I had seen before. When we finally got to Bozeman and made the drive to Big Skyn, it was gorgeous. The mountains were huge, everything was covered in snow, and wildlife was everywhere. While my sister and dad were out on the slopes, my mom took me shopping, we went to a bear and wolf zoo, and we went dog sledding. After seeing all the pictures of what we were able to do, my sister got jealous that she did not get to join us. Although I thought it wouldn’t be any fun, my amazing mother managed to make it one of my favorite trips I’ve ever been on. It may be a basic lesson but making the most out of any situation is a good one to know.