Day Eleven - Park City, Utah

Woke up early this morning which was easy yet painful on account of the sake I had consumed the evening before with Robin, Coni and her date, and headed down to Salt Lake City to pick up Bettina at the airport. The wonderful thing about skiing in Utah is that you can literally get off a plane and in less than an hour be on the slopes and that is exactly what we did, taking advantage of being on the west side of the mountains to ski at Snowbird. The Hong Kong crew were headed to Alta but since Bettina is a snowboarder and Alta is skier-only, we decided to visit the mountain next door.

It was snowing most of the way up there and we quickly donned our gear, got our tickets and hit the slopes. It was beautiful. There was almost a foot of new powder and lots of largely untouched terrain. I have to say this was one of the best ski days of my life. I was in good form and skiing well and the conditions were lovely. Bettina of course led the way and had me skiing a number of challenging blacks which is exactly what I needed to improve. We skied for about four hours before calling it quits; her because of having had such an early morning to make the flight to SLC; me because of having had such a late night. Nonetheless an unforgettable experience.

Afterwards, we repaired to our hotel, a lovely Swiss-alp style resort called Zermatt in Midway, located not too far from Park City. The staff were all dressed in clothing reminiscent of the stereo-typical Bavarian ledderhosen and bloused shirts, and the decor was very faux Swiss ski chalet. Charming non-the-less.

Dinner that evening was at '350' located in historic downtown Park City. Why is it called 350? At a time where coming up with a catchy name for a restaurant is a challenge, how about just using the street address as the name? I am actually thinking of naming my house '1000' for the same reason, as in "let's meet at 1000 this evening" or "what's happening over at 1000 today?" We were a big party with the Hong Kong crew, Coni, her date, Seanie, Robin, Bettina, Huang and I. Lovely meal which we celebrated in the name of someone's birthday (the wine was flowing so liberally that I am ashamed to say that I can't remember whose. Maybe Don or Paul?) Afterwards we went across the street to a no-name club/bar where the women got in free and we had to pay a cover charge. I tried to argue that we were bringing more women but that didn't wash. Oh well. My, what a meat market! Bettina and Huang (an attractive 30-something Park City Realtor who had attached herself to our party some time the day before) were cornered by a couple of twenty-somethings when they strayed too far from our herd and had to extract themselves from a pickup-artist-like scene. Having never actually picked up anyone in a bar and seeing how transparent the scene is I have to admit that it must work sometimes otherwise no-one would do it. But that is the subject of another post.

So around midnight or maybe 1am we decide we have had enough and head back to Zermatt for the night but not before being asked in the elevator on the way down from the club by some twenty-something guys cut from the same cloth as the aforementioned whether Bettina and I had met that night or had arrived together. I replied, "Does it matter?" and left it at that.