Feeling Invinsible and Free

I grew up on a farm. In some ways I may not have always appreciated the experience for what it was. But I definitely didn't hate it. Who I am and how my life has progressed would be considerably different if I hadn't grown up in the country. One of the best parts was winter fun activities after all the chores and homework was done. Any chance we got, in whatever season, we spent our time outside. In winter we did things like sledding down the huge hills in the pastures, or climbing on top of barn roofs and sliding down them, or my favorite... ski-dooing!

[caption id="attachment_199" align="aligncenter" width="517" caption="Little me all ready for a ride"][/caption]

When I was in high school my step sister and I were obsessed. We'd sometimes wake up early and go before school. But we definitely went first thing when we got off the bus after school. We'd go for an hour or two. Throw our stuff in the dryer, and half an hour later run out again. This pattern continued all evening until midnight were we'd head to bed and do it all over again the next day. On the week-ends often me and a bunch of girl friends would use whatever skidoos we could and head out for the afternoon of sledding over where ever we could drive our skidoos.

Then I moved away for school and didn't visit all that often. When I did it was in the summer time. So it had been 8 years since I last sat on one. Until today. My sister and her fiance keep their skidoos out at my dad's place as they live in town, and out at dad's there is so much more space to go. They invited us out with them today to take dad's skidoos out while they drove their sleds. After an hour of struggling we got all four sleds running great and off we went. We've had a lot of snow in the past month. Specifically the past couple days. So there was four feet of powder, plus the almost foot and a half of base. So that's a lot of snow.

Right away we all found ourselves stuck. Like digging your sled out of snow almost to your waist stuck. And regardless of where we went, this seemed to be the story. Eventually we got a pretty good trail along the highway packed down and my sister, her fiance and I  had no problems but Mr. J's sled had other ideas. He had never gone skidooing before so we thought his slow driving was just a mark of a rookie. Taking it cautious, always getting stuck, that sort of thing.  After an hour of watching him drive two feet... get stuck... dig it out and keep going only to repeat it again in two feet. We try his sled out and realize there's a problem with it! He was trying to pin the throttle but there was no change. Anyways, we got home safe and had a good time after we figured out how to get his machine going faster.

But all this to say. Sometimes you don't know what you miss until you try it again. Made me feel like I was younger, before I lost some of my naivety and realized I'm not invincible! But sometimes, every once in a while it's fun to feel that free again.