What to do when the temperature is nearly 50 degrees and it’s a school holiday?  You head to the slopes or at least a patch of manmade snow at Whitetail Ski Resort in Pennsylvania for some tubing.  It’s about 2 hours from our home.  We took the entire family and Katelyn’s really good friend, Nadia, for 2 hours of tubing at one of the closest ski resort to NOVA. 

After leaving at around 9:30 AM and stopping for lunch, we arrived at Whitetail around 12:45PM.  We headed for the tubing area and picked up our tubes and headed up the conveyor belt to bring us up to to top (Disclosure:  Minimum age is 5 for tubing, Kiersten is 4 but since the bunny slope for tubing has less of a slope than our driveway, we told Kiersten that for the day, she could be 5 ). 

Surprisingly all the kids, including Kiersten wanted to go down by themselves.  Everyone had a great time on the first run.  On the way up the conveyor the second time, Katelyn fell and quickly caused a 5 person, 5 tube pile-up.  On the third time up, Kiersten caused another pile up.  Lisa and I finally realized that if each adult pulled 2 tubes and the kids went up the conveyor by themselves, no pile-up!  Tah Dah!

  We’re so bright.

We went down all the different runs but the fastest and most exciting were the ones that we linked up a few tubes together.  See the first and second group videos.   After 2 exciting hours and about 10 runs, we headed home for some good dinner and recuperating.

Peter had a leadership team meeting in Clinton, NJ this week as part of a new job starting on March 1.  As part of the meeting, he had a team building event to visit the 9/11 memorial site along with a few other sites in New York.  The 9/11 memorial and the nearby buildings are still being built, but the two reflecting pools were in place, working and beautiful.  On the site is also the only tree that survived the attacks, a callery pear tree (surrounded by a sea of newly planted oak trees) known as the Survivor tree. 

The site’s museum is being built around some of the some of the old tower structures.  Part of the museum is glass so that visitors outside the museum can see some of the structures trough the museum’s glass window.  It’s hard to understand the powerful forces that tore these huge metal beams apart.

Although not the only site that Peter visited that night, it was by far the most memorable.

Monday is Chinese New Year (Year of the Dragon) and so since the kids have never experienced a the celebration, we headed to Seven Corners/Eden Center in Falls Church (a big Vietnamese Center).  We saw the traditional Dragon Dance along with plenty of fire works on the ground.  We also went to lunch in one of the restaurant where we were greeted with a close and personal Dragon Dance when the dancers and band dropped by the restaurant.  It was nice to experience a good Vietnamese meal (although the salad was no where nearly as good as those of the Four Sisters restaurant in Merrifield, VA), although I had to

repeatedly explain to the kids why they couldn’t have Pizza for lunch.  In the end, the dessert of sticky rice with coconut and great grilled pork with rice made up for the pizza.  A good fun afternoon in the cold Virginia weather.