Last Monday and Tuesday we decided to make a trip to Big Bear Lake to go skiing at Snow Summit.  We have a trip to Whistler coming up, so we wanted to get some skiing in before then.

We started out on Monday morning a little after 9:00am.  We made it to Big Bear Lake at about 11:20am. Just over two hours isn’t too bad to get to some good skiing.  We decided to have lunch at Blondie Grill and Bar. They had a suprisingly good vegetarian selection.  I had a Cick N Veggie Wrap and M had a Soy Chicken Parm. My wrap was not too bad. M was suprised that her’s cam with spaghetti, but she ended up deciding that it was a good thing.  

After lunch we checked into our hotel, the Northwoods Resort. Although it was only about noon, we were able to check into out room. That was good because it allowed us to change into our ski clothes. The weather was very warm, so I just wore jeans, a t-shirt and a light fleece.

We started towards the mountain when we realized that it would probably be better to rent our skis in the Village instead of going to the base of the slope to rent. We made the right decision. We stopped at a place called Bellows and the rentals were much cheaper, skis we $12 for the first half-day and $14 for the next day. The place was empty and we got our skis quickly. The only downside was that they didn’t have any high-performance skis. Next time we’ll have to try to find a place that carries them.

We were on the slopes by about 1:00pm. The weather was perfect, warm and sunny. We took a couple of runs on the bunny slope to warm up and then starting skiing on Summit Run. A nice easy green one. We skied that until Michele got tired around 3:30. I then went for another three runs on some black diamonds until the lifts closed at 4:00p.

After skiing we headed back to the hotel and freshened up for dinner. The good thing about Northwoods is that it is right in the Village. We walked up and down the main street to look for a good place for dinner. The Himalayan Restaurant looked good, but we decided on Peppercorn Grille instead. It turned out to be a good choice. We had some salad for starters and I had Cannelloni and M had Lasagna. Both were good. For desert we had a pumpkin cheesecake. The service was good, but a little slow because they were so busy.

The next day we slept in a little and had breakfast at the hotel. We had some half-decent omelettes. We didn’t hit the slopes until about 11. We skied mostly chair 9 where M got comfortable with the intermediate runs. We had veggie burgers for lunch at the bottom lodge. I skied a bunch more black diamonds after M had had enough around 3.

It was a very enjoyable trip and we really liked doing the overnight stay, instead of rushing to get as much skiing in as possible in a single day with a bunch of driving.