Having just finished my favorite lunch of a peanut butter and banana sandwich with an ice-cold root beer, it is time to talk about how many sick days at work you have saved up so you can use them this coming winter to find your own freedom on the side of a ski hill while you are getting a sunburned face at the same time. Unfortunately, you cannot buy such a wonderful sandwich at any ski resort or mountaintop restaurant. You usually have your choice of a cheeseburger or a hamburger starting at $12.95.
I skied for a lot of years with a very successful investment banker who could easily have bought the entire resort if it had been for sale. One day he and his wife were eating an egg salad sandwich that they had hauled to the top of the mountain in their fanny packs. They also had a couple of hard-boiled eggs and four Oreo cookies. They were staying in a deluxe, $399-a-night room in a slope side condominium. After spending the morning skiing with his wife and their private instructor, he said, “I have done a cost analysis on the food prices and they are way too high. Anyway, how do you think I have gotten where I am financially if I didn’t watch things such as a too-expensive lunch for us? Besides my wife, Agnes, is really good at boiling eggs. Would you like a bite of Agnes’s egg salad sandwich?”
This kind of apparent frugality is strange from a man and his wife who fly up here in their private jet to ski.
There can be incredible economic disparity among the many different people who are eating lunch in a mountain restaurant on any given day.
At the table next to us is a group of true road warriors. Eight of them have just driven twelve hundred miles nonstop except for gas so they can ski their brains out during this one-week-a-year ski vacation. No egg salad sandwiches for them.
They want the energy and camaraderie that comes with sharing sandwiches at the mountain restaurant.
I always figure that peanut butter and sliced bananas on eight-grain bread will make those afternoon turns on those demo skis a lot smoother and your legs a lot stronger.
I learned another thing from one of those marathon, twenty-four-hour nonstop road warriors: When it was his turn to drive at two in the morning he would be twenty minutes into his driving shift when he would hit the brakes and swerve just enough while screaming, “Wow, what a nightmare I just had!” This will wake everyone up and someone would not trust him to drive and take over so he could fall asleep again!
Years ago, before the invention of release or safety bindings, as I still call them, it was estimated that a skier had one chance in ten of getting hurt on skis.
That logic would lead you to believe that if you skied ten times during the winter you would get hurt. I averaged about a hundred days of skiing each winter every year but one since 1946. That is a lot of skiing and I only got hurt once and that was when a binding released prematurely while I was traversing at only three miles an hour. Fortunately, I didn’t break my leg, but I did break my back. After missing my peanut butter and banana sandwiches for seventeen days and having to live on hospital food, including a lot of different colored bowls of Jell-O, I finally got home to good old fashioned peanut butter and banana sandwiches that my wife makes for me.
If you want to get more runs for the price of your lift ticket all you need is a fanny pack that will hold a couple of those great sandwiches. Cut them in half and leisurely eat them while you are riding on the lift.