As you likely know, my husband’s a proud Minnesotan who grew up around a whole lot of snow. Me, not so much (and I can’t say I’ve been missing it – brrrrr). But my dear husband really really wanted to get his daughter to the snow.

So for MLK Day weekend we headed to Portland, just a 2.5 hour flight away, where we could get SNOW (Mt. Hood) and some family time with Uncle Greg, Bart’s brother who lives in Portland. Because my husband is awesome (and he knew I wasn’t going to love the snow as much as the rest of the family), he made sure there was something for everyone.

He booked us at the Timberline Lodge, best known for being the hotel in the creepy exterior shots of The Shining! It’s the little things. And for the record, while it’s a cool hotel with an amazing history that has nothing to do with the movie, it wasn’t as creepy as I’d hoped. Partly because there wasn’t a blizzard, but then also many of the outside action shots were created in a studio in England (like the maze – no maze at Timberline). Anyway, there WAS snow.

And as a (perhaps) interesting aside, Jack Nicholson’s hotel room was room 217 in the original book, but because the lodge was afraid no one would STAY in that room if they used that room number, the movie uses room 237, which doesn’t exist at the Timberline… Silly choice, I’d say, since I bet there would be a lot more people REQUESTING that room than avoiding it (as I did – it was not avail).

Anyway, first thing Zoe did when she got to the snow? Snowball fight:

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Next? She ATE it. In fact, she would have KEPT eating it all night if we would’ve let her.

Not to worry – Daddy quickly trained her on which snow to avoid. Just ask her: the “pee” and “poop” snow. And after building a little snowman, we headed out to go snow tubing. Immediately upon arriving you can see lots of people heading up the hill on the “magic carpet” and sliding down on their tubes. We were sure she was going to love it.

I put her in a tube, dragged her to the carpet, and we made our way to the top. She went down the hill in a double-tube with Daddy without a sound, then at the bottom, she started bawling. Turns out we should have maybe prepped her a LITTLE bit on what this whole tube thing was… but come on, she’s the first to run to the top of big slides and giggle all the way down. I’m not sure exactly where we went wrong.

That said, there was plenty of flat snow near the bottom (out of the way), where she LOVED being dragged around in circles, as fast as possible, which we did for about an hour and a half. Let me tell you, that’s a workout. But she never went down the hill again.

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And ALL that said, she absolutely loved the snow. Good call, Dad. I’m sure you and your sweet little daughter will have hours of fun skiing, snowball fighting, snowboarding and more, while I make sure all our stuff is safe (and warm) in whatever creepy hotel you choose.