Las Lenas

We are in Las Lenas which we are very excited to see. It feels good to be in the mountains and to see the snow. Our last bag arrived at the Mendoza airport Friday night after I waited there for 3 hours for it to show up, it's quite a trip taking taxis when you really don't speak the language, one driver showed me a Creedance Clearwater cd that he had and asked me what it was - Classica rock n roll musica was all I could think to tell him, other than muy bien. We left mendoza super late after a nice dinner at this local little eatery, once again Jen ends up with Ham and cheese, she's on a roll with that! We rode an overnight bus up to Las lenas that left the station at 2:30 am, tried to sleep on the bus so that we would be ready to ski on Saturday, the 2nd. We arrived just as the sun is starting to come up and it's overcast, so can't see a whole lot at first. Wander our way up to the (hopefully) right apartments, and there's Martin!! It's exciting to see some other people that we know. Get to hang out with Matt, Kurt/Rusty, and Martin for the next couple of days. We get ready, and go skiing, Jen and I are running on fumes at this point, not much sleep, no real food, but we have snow! Get our tickets and go and check the area out. Jen and Martin take off in their own little world, I go and ski with Matt and Rusty, our first run was an awesome steep powder run, just had to sign a sheet accepting our own responsibility before going thru the gate. Yeaahhh!! Snow! that first run felt soo good, snow flying up in the air behind me as I make nice powder turns. We go back around and keep skiing the same area over and over again since only a couple of chairs are open. They have lots of pommel/surface lifts here and the wind is blowing hard. We are finding out that they don't open many of the chairs here due to weather and wind which sucks cause the terrain looks incredible, we just can't seem to get to it. Eat a nice lunch, realize how tired we are and try to get back out for some more runs, but they close down everything except the pommel lifts, that blows, and the lines are competitive, almost downright rude at times. I go and have a bottle of wine with Rusty and Matt on the deck, we chill and enjoy ourselves before looking for some groceries and our shuttle. We find the right shuttle for getting ourselves to our next stop, the cabanas, but we have sooo much stuff, our skis, our packs and luggage, we fill this little van full, but they keep shoving more people into our van. Wow, this is nuts, we finally get moving and end up being the last ones dropped off. The cabins turn out to be really nice, they are just in this desolote little valley 20 min down from the resort, all that's out here is wind, mntns, sage type brush and rocks. The boys and I go in search for food, try walking a half mile down to the other couple of hotels in the same area, first hotel, no luck and she doesn't reccomend the other one either, so we walk into the 3rd one, wander around this dining room and thankfully we find one guy who speaks english and find out that the dinner is for guests only but they will accomadate us luckily for us. We end up having one of the nicest dinners I've had in quite a while. A full course meal, wonderful empanadas, wrapped chicken and egg, and beautiful desserts plus the great wine. We feel spoiled, they don´t eat dinner till late around here, it didn't even start till 9, so by the time we make it back to our cabin, it's late and Jen and Martin are already asleep. Time to get ready for the next day.

One thing we have learned about being here in Argentina is that you can't rush anything! We are on their time, we spend a lot of our time waiting for shuttles or buses and then once the shuttle shows up you wait even longer. If we aren't waiting for a bus, then we are waiting for them to open more than one chair and two pommel lifts on the mountain. My 2nd day here in Las Lenas, Jen and I decide not to spend our money on a ticket since not much is open and we head out to hike with Martin. I have come down with a cold, so after an hour of hiking in the wind I decide to bail and go back to the ski area and wait for the other boys. Jen and Martin keep going. I hang out with the boys and eat some lunch and chill until it's time to catch our shuttle down to the cabin. This time we stock up at the local and only grocery store so that we can make our own dinner in our cozy little cabin. For our 3rd day here it's snowing when we wake up, which is exciting, but we can't find our shuttle driver! It's pretty desolate down in the valley at Los Molles where we are staying and everyone is getting frustrated that we have no way out of here. Close to 11, the driver finally shows up and once again we are loading multiple packs, skis and luggage, we have way too much stuff all together. Finally make it up to the resort and ditch our luggage. I´d reccomend not staying at the cabins in Los Molles unless you have your own car, you're pretty stuck once there with not many options. Since we are so late on arrival we wait until half day ticket prices, which doesn't start till 12:45, and there is no selling of tickets until that time. We finally get on our way and the snow is excellent, light fluffy powder and the skies are starting to clear. We end up having a blue bird powder day and then they open up the volcano chair so we have some new terrain to go and explore. I ski with the boys, Matt and Rusty all afternoon and we just keep doing laps on this powder face, it's perfect. One run we go out further to see if we can ski into these chutes, but as we stand at the top it completely cracks, oops, time to turn around and just ski the face instead. What an awesome day, I just love snow like this, too bad we can't ski from the top though, have to wonder if they ever open up that top chair, Martes. We ski until we can't anymore then it's off to our little apartment room up here on the mountain. Our room is super tiny, just has 4 bunk beds and a trundle, a bit tight for all 5 of us and our gear, but at least we don't have to deal with a shuttle this time around and can chill out for the night.