Toby, Max and I visited Mt. Hood for a day of playing in the snow on Thursday, 28 Dec 2006. The start of the day was pretty rough, but God worked it all out in the end and we had a great day. We left later than I wanted and so we got caught in traffic on the way up, adding an extra 45 minutes to our 1 hour drive to the mountain. When we got to Summit Ski area (where we had gone tubing previously) we found out that they were sold out of tubes and there was a waiting list. We waited about a half an hour and the rumor was that someone had reservation of 30 tubes. Toby called another tubing place and found out that they had about 10 tubes left. Unfortunately, we didn’t know exactly where Ski Bowl East was located, only that we had seen a sign for it on the way up. Toby and I spent some minutes yelling at each other about where it was before we were able to follow the signs over. When we got to SkiBowl, we were told that the parking was full. Undaunted, Toby drove forward and dropped me and Max off to get the tubes. The official line at the rental area was that they were out of tubes until 3pm (it was now noon). Toby found a parking place and came over. She was not happy when I told her that there were no tubes to be rented. She walked around and saw a big pile of about 25 tubes and talked to the employee standing next to them. That guy said he didn’t understand why they weren’t renting out the tubes. Toby grabbed 3 of them and sent me to buy 3 park tickets. The guy behind the counter told me that there were no tubes to be rented, so I yelled to Toby to make sure she already had tubes. She did. The guy still was hesitant to sell me the tickets. I finally was able to browbeat him into selling me the tickets. We were set. After that the day was great. Max spent a good deal of the day just climbing up and down a small hill with another little boy while Toby and I tubed down the adjacent hill. (After all we had been through, we were determined to get our money’s worth of tubing.)
