For Christmas this year I decided to go the adventure route and got him a gift certificate to go snow tubing at a nearby resort, also complete with all of the snow gear needed. Call it my latest attempt to put a little dose of the great outdoors into this city boy’s life!

After a series of busy weekends, we were finally able to head up to the mountain! When you think of New York City, mountains are definitely not something that comes to mind unless you want to count skyscrapers. It actually turns out that there are a number of resorts within 2 hours of the city! Not as close as the old Claw at home, but not bad. After doing some research I found a number of different bus and shuttle services that take groups from the city to the slopes each weekend. I’m not much of a skier (having only gone twice) and after seeing Chris on ice skates last year I decided that tubing was definitely the safest option for both of us! After comparing a lot of the bus services (that mostly cater to skiers and snowboarders) I decided that going to Mountain Creek was our best option. The resort is only an hour and a half from the city and the bus picks up at the main bus terminal, Port Authority.

The only part of our trip I wasn’t that excited about was the alarm clock going off. The bus left Port Authority at 7:30 and is about 40 minutes from our apartments by subway, so needless to say it was an early morning! Nothing an orange juice (iced coffee for him) and some 7/11 donuts couldn’t solve though! Once we were on the bus we got a nice little nap on the way up to the mountain too.

The day we went up there was absolutely gorgeous! Clear, sunny and a little brisk. Our snow gear kept us nice and toasty though!

It’s interesting to me because Mountain Creek is actually mostly made up of man-made snow. This was kind of a new concept to someone who grew up right on the plateau of the mountain, but real or man-made, the crowds flooded to the resort!

Our tubing session was a couple hours after our bus arrived so we spent some time exploring the resort before the crowds really took over. It was a really nice place! They had a number of restaurants and a beer garden outside in front of a fire with german food, which was pretty awesome in my book.

After a few hours of exploring we headed over to the tubing area called “The Drop Zone”. I hadn’t been tubing since I was younger and most of the people lining up for our session were under the age of 10, but I was still hopeful that it would be fun! At least crossing my fingers in hopes that I didn’t end up giving a really lame Christmas present!

Luckily my memory served me well and it was just as awesome as I remembered it! We may have been the only adults without kids at the park, but we still had a blast! With 15 lanes to pick from we had so much fun deciding which lanes were the fastest. It didn’t take long for Chris to somehow master the art of speed down the hills, somehow always hitting the blob (as I called it), which was a big inflatable balloon at the bottom of the slopes that you would run into if the mats at the bottom of the hill didn’t slow you down enough. I’m not sure how he managed it, but he literally hit it every time.

After our two hours were up we were exhausted and ready to head back to the lodge for some grub! Tubing can be tiring! As a bonus to our tubing tickets we also got free tickets to one of their new attractions called the soaring eagle. It basically looked like a chairlift but was on a zip line. I like to think I’m not a total chicken but something about going backwards really freaks me out and this did exactly that. So you can bet your bottom dollar I was trying to talk Chris out of making me do it.. but when two 7 year old girls got off right in front of us yelling let’s do it again, I knew I didn’t have much of a case to back out. I pretty much had a death grip on Chris’ arm the entire time, but I am proud to say I did do it! Woh hoh!

After the soaring eagle we headed to one of their outdoor fires and enjoyed the rest of the day keeping warm and watching the skiers and snowboarders come down the hill! We had such a great time and I’m really happy I looked into it! A lot of people just assume there isn’t anything for them to do at the mountain if they don’t ski or snowboard so this is a good reminder that tubing is the perfect way to have fun and get out in the snow! I’d definitely recommend Mountain Creek to anyone in the tri-state area! It also turns into a water slide park in the summer so we just might have to check that out too!

Down the Mountain We Go!